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THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 



THE 

Penalties of Taste 

AND 

OTHER ESSAYS 



NORMAN BRIDGE 

1/ 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD & COMPANY 

1908 



Copyright, 1898, by 
HERBERT S. STONE & CO. 



This Edition Published 

October, 1908, by 

DUFFIELD & COMPANY 



76 11^^ 

.;bi7"P4; 






CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Penalties of Taste . . . . i 

Two Kinds of Conscience .... 27 

Bashfulness 59 

The Nerves of the Modern Child . . 87 

Some Lessons of Heredity . • . .119 
Our Poorly Educated Educators . . 143 



The Penalties of Taste 



The purpose of knowledge is to increase 
the life and comfort of man. We seem to 
seek knowledge for its own sake, but we do 
not. We enjoy the seeking, well knowing 
that some of our findings will be useful. 
The ulterior aim is the mental happiness as 
well as the physical comfort of the race, and 
especially of the individual. 

First we must have the necessities, bread, 
clothes, warmth and shelter ; not merely for 
the moment, but for the future. The hand- 
to-mouth method, which most of us pursue, 
is really repugnant to our instinctive sense. 
We desire to accumulate; it is only our 
weakness in the face of temptation that 
prevents us from doing it. 

Next naturally come through our knowl- 
edge the amenities, the refinements of life, 
and the embellishments which we dignify as 
arts. Some of these are useful in securing 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

the primal necessities of life — others exist 
for the pleasure they may give us, and appar- 
ently for this alone. 

In accomplishing the sought-for object, 
whatever it may be, there is a selection from 
among different ways and things. We 
choose one thing and reject another. We 
have a preference ; this evidences the begin- 
ning of taste. 

Choice, or taste, as to getting and having 
is utilitarian; it helps in the business of 
acquisition. It is for an end in life, but it is 
not itself the end. It helps us to live, to 
accomplish our various purposes. 

But we select also not to gain some ulterior 
object, but for the pleasure in the emotional 
enjoyment of the thing selected; not to 
acquire something, but because we have 
acquired something. That something may 
be called selective feeling or power. It 
does not help us to live — to get bread — 
rather we to some extent live for it. This 
is taste in the higher sense, and it may 
become so much a part of us that its 
demands are nearly as inexorable as hunger. 
It drives us to spend almost as much for the 
decorations as for the body of the garment 
or of the house. 

Whether taste is utilitarian or exists for 



THE PENALTIES OF YASTE 

its own sake, it is the same in essence. It is 
one of the unavoidable refinements of exist- 
ence and thought. It comes with the rising 
of the race, with growth and with natural 
selection, and it is potent in helping the 
race to rise. Because of it some survive, 
while others fail and fall. But ordinarily 
this classification does not obtain among us. 
If the selective sense is exercised strictly for 
useful and necessary purposes we are very 
apt to call it worldly acumen or good judg- 
ment ; while if it more directly contributes 
to a beauty and pleasure not necessarily con- 
nected with the acquisition of the bare needs 
of life, we call it taste. But it is psycho- 
logically one thing and not two things. And 
strictly it is quite impossible to sharply seg- 
regate the utilitarian from the esthetic taste, 
since they to some degree blend into each 
other. 

The primary purpose of taste must be to 
lead us right and not wrong; it is our 
natural guide. If it made no mistakes it 
would always lead us to the right pastures, 
the best springs and best shade. But it 
makes mistakes sometimes, and it leads us 
wrong and so begets discomfort as well as 
happiness; it is both fortunate and unfor- 
tunate. It often gives us not only great 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

pleasure in itself, but the gratification of suc- 
cess of various kinds — some useful to the 
serious purposes of our lives, some quite 
useless or worse than useless. But by its 
misdirection or excess of refinement, it often 
also wears out our nerves and embitters our 
years. Too much of a good ingredient spoils 
the mixture. If only a little in excess in the 
solution, the products of the yeast plant are 
sure to poison and kill every germ of it. So 
of the whole world of microscopic life. Thus 
it is with the emotions and refinements of 
our human lives. The best element and 
influence, if in excess, may wither the very 
thing it is calculated to foster and conserve. 

There is a vast multitude of aids to the 
formation of taste. Any hour almost we can 
have free advice about it. All the schools 
of every sort are ready to help us to it. So 
are all the good people who strongly think 
they themselves possess a large share of cor- 
rect taste. And we usually get the advice in 
abundance, such as it is. But we grope in 
the twilight or the fog for guides against the 
excess, and the effects of wrong taste. 

We are a race of experimenting, un- 
finished, and evolving units. We blunder 
— blunder in everything, and, of course, 
blunder in taste. We learn haltingly or too 

4 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

ardently in certain directions and with poor 
sense of proportion, and so our knowledge is 
often wof uUy out of balance. 

The selective feeling or taste is something 
altogether necessary, but always to be gov- 
erned and regulated. To select the right 
thing in the right proportion and to know 
the thing to avoid, is the great desideratum. 
It is the consummation of the utility of taste. 

In any study of this subject a few cardinal 
facts force themselves into view. 

In the first place, taste for taste's sake 
costs. But utilitarian taste saves. This 
latter means the most economical, durable 
and useful houses, tools and clothes; it 
means less expense in living, more resources 
for the future, more leisure for the workers. 
It brings the best results with the least labor 
and expense ; it is profitable in the highest 
sense, so truly profitable that some critics are 
sure to deny the definition, and say it is a 
bad use of the word taste. 

On the other hand, taste of the esthetic 
sort, of a high order, what may be called 
taste for taste's sake, always adds to some- 
body's burdens; its proper possession is for 
the leisure of the race, for the time and state 
of lessened burdens and accumulated profits. 
Feathers, ribbons, lace, pictures and jewels, 

5 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

expensive amusements and indulgences, 
always cost and never save. 

We must not only have taste in the ways 
of money-making, but taste in all the ameni- 
ties and refinements of life. We must know 
the correct demeanor, correct manners and 
clothes, the right language to use, the true 
standards of decoration of houses and things, 
and the perfect gauge of art in all directions. 
This is the fiat of growth and development. 

Taste, quite as much as education or 
general intelligence, fixes the place of men 
and women in the social scale. And the 
social scale is, next to freedom from starva- 
tion, sun-strokes and frost, the most impor- 
tant thing in the world. A lapse from our 
standard of taste, that will make us ridicu- 
lous in the eyes of the set we belong to (or 
aspire to belong to), is always a most grievous 
misfortune, and no one would willingly be 
guilty of it. To eat with a knife ; or to say, 
"I seen John," or "I have never saw such 
weather before," is more damning to a cer- 
tain social existence than to be charged with 
theft, or be indicted by the grand jury. A 
man can bear criticism of his utilitarian taste 
as he endures an unfortunate speculation; 
but to know that his sense of manners and 
the esthetics is open to censure or ridicule, 
6 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

cuts him to the quick. It is such mortifica- 
tion and the fear of it that holds worthy- 
people to the laudable ambition to strive to 
have correct taste. 

But standards of taste differ; we do not 
agree even as to what they are. One social 
order or class of people holds to one; 
another to another; and they all change 
with the years. Often the canons of taste of 
one set are execrated by the set above or 
below it — for if there is any subject on which 
sensible people give themselves complete 
license in the use of the superlative degree, 
that subject is what they regard as bad taste. 

So we have a very babel of diversity in 
esthetic sense and sentiment; and a great 
dispute is forever going on as to what really 
constitutes correct taste and true art. The 
fact is that each grade of social and intel- 
lectual existence has a standard, or stand- 
ards, of its own. That which is most 
artistic to a particular man is his standard 
and his rod for measuring all beside. 

People are constantly passing from one 
social level to another, usually from lower 
to higher ones. Many have aspirations 
for higher stages, and if they attain them 
they must, with each little step, learn some 
new criterion of taste and art; and if the 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

step is a long one, the lessons are numerous, 
difficult and extremely perplexing. The 
struggle for the new standard, forever go- 
ing on and always intense, and never fully 
rewarded with quite the hoped-for gain, is 
one of the pathetic travails of the race. 

Take a boy reared on a farm, with small 
knowledge of the amenities and estimates of 
refined city life. Let him go to live in the 
city and try to learn these, and see his strug- 
gles and mortifications. Or let him enter a 
school of city boys from the best families, 
and see the sweat and the agony of his initia- 
tion, far prolonged till he has learned his 
lesson. The treatment of their prisoners by 
the barbarians is a fair comparison to this. 
He not unlikely finds that his treatment at 
the hands of his fellows is barbarous. But 
forceful people of the highest development, 
on occasion and for an occasion sometimes 
drop back some steps and show their bar- 
baric propensities; and they rarely do it 
more pronouncedly than when as boys they 
show some greenhorn of a fellow what they 
regard as his proper paces. 

Then we are perplexed by the dictum, 
which we hear so often from the highly cul- 
tivated, that there is, fixed and immutable, 
one true standard of art, that everybody 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

must know and believe in, or be adjudged to 
be nobody. There may be such a standard, 
but if so, the vast majority refuse to agree 
as to what it is; a majority of thinking 
people it seems cannot be led to unite on 
any very definite criterion. Each one stick- 
les for his own notions and standards ; and 
these are as multifarious as the shadows. 

If we study the question analytically we 
find that much of taste with any social group 
is simply a matter of fashion. What was 
good taste last year may be bad taste now, 
otherwise bad fashion. So, as the fashion 
changes in our particular group, we scurry to 
keep up with it, and generally fail. Per- 
haps we catch up at times, but usually late 
and always with scattered ranks, like a strag- 
gling army coming into camp. The trouble 
is we usually don't know just when and at 
what rate the fashion does change. Charles 
Dudley Warner some years ago proposed 
an international committee to keep track of 
its fluctuations and inform us promptly for 
our guidance. He said, for example, that 
he knew the year before it was good taste 
for a gentleman to stand with his thumbs in 
his vest pockets, but he was wholly at sea as 
to whether it still was good taste. 

A friend of mine once changed or created 

9 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

a fashion in trousers in a town of Illinois by 
wearing for a day, tinder the stress of dire 
necessity, a garment made of some loud stuff 
that was not really in fashion in any part of 
the world. He was a stranger on the street, 
was known to live in the metropolis, and the 
gullible men took his clothes as an infallible 
sign of the coming fashion, and so straight- 
way, before night, bought out all the neg- 
lected stock of such goods to be found in town 
— much to the joy of the merchants who 
had foreseen serious loss. For aught I know 
some of those men have never yet learned 
that their terrible, plaid trousers of one 
summer of long ago were only in fashion in 
their own little burg; and they are probably 
happier in the ignorance. 

If any man is in doubt that taste and stand- 
ards change, let him observe how the next 
hundred people shake hands with him. 
Most will grasp his hand in the old, easy 
way, the hands striking at the most comfort- 
able level ; but a few, say one in forty, will 
grasp and hold it for an instant rigidly at 
the level of his middle shirt stud. He feels 
an instinctive surprise at this; he tries 
momentarily to get the hands down to the 
old level, but he finds his gentle pressure in 
that direction is resisted, and gives it up. 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

When he reflects that invariably the friend 
with the new shake is one who moves in the 
strictly modern set, and perhaps has been 
off to college, he divines the changing of a 
standard and wonders if the new fashion is 
founded on a desire to grasp hands on the 
level of the heart. 

Note how a hundred men on the street 
show with their hats their respect for a lady 
or gentleman. There are at least half a 
dozen different ways and they speak for as 
many different epochs or localities. They 
range from the simple touch of the brim to 
the very modern and now less exclusive but 
awkward bringing of the hat down with the 
crown presenting so that it will cover a high 
collar or a flowing necktie. 

Standards in art, pure art, change. The 
soft landscapes of old, that aimed to present 
nature as it is or as most people see it to be, 
or think they do, are now rather out of date, 
and we have instead the impressionist's dash 
of awful color. May be this is truer; at 
least it shows an evolution. Such facts 
prove that if there is any fixed and everlast- 
ing standard of true art it must be one so 
narrow as to be confined to the very primer 
of the subject, the few basal principles of 
harmony and grace. 

II 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

There is a standard of taste for every man. 
Men rise and their standards change; per- 
haps the latter rise also, they certainly 
change. No standard rises truly that does 
not thereby better serve the true interests of 
all; we may think otherwise, but it is not 
otherwise. The best taste must always con- 
serve the pleasure and profit of the person 
concerned. That which is art to any par- 
ticular man is his standard. Next year or 
decade maybe, he will have thrown aside 
the thing that now comforts him, and come to 
enjoy a better and perhaps a higher one. 
Art must minister to the sentiments of the 
man — the sentiments change and evolve with 
the amplification of the mind, and the stand- 
ards change likewise. 

In the one social set that we have grown 
up in or grown into we think we know the 
lines of fashion and taste, and feel that we 
are getting along, and the thought comforts 
us. But straightway we struggle to get into 
another and perhaps a higher company — ^not 
always really a higher one, albeit often one 
with more glitter — and then it dawns 
upon us that we have been worshiping the 
wrong gods, and are densely ignorant. 
We must immediately acquire a new set of 
ideas, new canons of correct taste and 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

thinking, and to some degree a new order 
of conduct. 

The change in standard of taste is like any- 
other development in response to the forces 
of evolution. For every man it ought to be 
(and frequently it is) a development toward 
a more perfect adjustment to his environ- 
ment. This is the true way, the ideal way 
that we so often fall short of realizing; 
in our groping toward it without fixed 
notions of what we are doing and what for, 
we often hitch and halt, then rush ahead and 
overdo it, and fret and fume over our ideals 
and accomplishments. 

To ape, or try to have, high taste without 
its necessary background of character and 
attainments, is always grotesque and comical. 
High refinement must come by natural 
steps ; it cannot be forced successfully. We 
may try to do this, but our automatic crudity 
always exposes us and brings humiliation; 
we always get caught sooner or later, and 
our vulnerable points are where we least 
think. The parvenu is beset with fear lest 
he shall blunder ; he tries not to, but ever in 
some evil moment he does. 

Over-decoration and dilettanteism in any 
line of thought or action is to the balanced 
mind always pitiable. Over-decoration only 

13 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

pleases the crude ; to those of normal taste it 
is always absurd; and its prevalence is so 
glaring that it tends to disgust the most 
refined people with decorations in general, 
and so they periodically, in their clothes and 
the houses they build and decorate, and in 
their manners, evince a return to a simplic- 
ity so severe that the world stops to notice 
and commend it. 

It is labor wasted to try to teach art to 
children unprepared for it; and for us to 
drill into them, or attempt to, the higher 
refinements before they have learned the 
essential decencies of life, savors of wicked- 
ness. Fancy a girl who cannot properly 
dress herself, who goes about with an 
untidy, perhaps a smooty neck, and slov- 
enly clothes, who has by her own neglect a 
room always left in chaotic disorder, being 
taught art and music and other embellish- 
ments; try to think in a speculative way of 
such a girl being embellished. Or take a girl, 
of average intelligence and less a lout, 
moved by her normal impulses of selfish- 
ness, which most children must have, whose 
intelligent conversation is mostly restricted 
to sports, gowns, neckties, stage people, 
and love stories read and dreamed about; 
who knows the least possible about her 

14 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

environment, except those elements of it 
which amuse her, and see how we try to 
teach her polish and taste, and what good 
art is. What is the use of it? She could 
not, to save her life, tell with any intimate 
knowledge a useful thing that her father or 
mother does in the daily round of duties. 
Even less is she capable of doing any of them 
herself. If her life is to be altogether 
sordid and selfish as it starts, and her time is 
to be given wholly to her amusement and 
gratification, this teaching might be wise. 
But even then she could acquire no wholly 
sane grasp of the subject. And if her life is 
to be of the slightest use in the world, her 
embellishments must supplement as well as 
ornament some plain knowledge of the vital 
things about her. 

This picture is not overdrawn ; there are 
many such girls and boys doomed to this 
kind of misuse of their powers and opportu- 
nities. Thus educated, or rather neglected, 
they harmonize with nothing but similar 
souls, and are out of joint with the universe. 
The most pathetic phase of the case of such 
children is that they are mainly either in 
families of wealthy people who may give 
them, if they will, the most symmetrical 
development and the best chance in the 

15 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

world, or in poorer families where there is a 
constant struggle to force them to a so-called 
higher social plane than they apparently 
occupy. The two classes of children are 
equally unfortunate and their parents are 
equally wrong. Both classes are entitled to 
a better race for life and a high career ; they 
have a right to better treatment at the hands 
of their fathers and mothers. 

The ministry of taste ought to be one of 
pleasure, but often and in diverse ways it 
brings a penalty of sorrow. Exalted taste 
always leads to hyperesthesia; it is syn- 
onymous with hyperesthesia, it means that. 
One who is excessively developed must be 
sensitive and fastidious in the direction of 
the over-growth ; he is perhaps dull in other 
directions as a consequence. The victim is 
perpetually nagged and worried by things 
that offend his taste. Bad taste is always 
about us; dirt and untidiness are every- 
where, and the squeamish person is likely to 
hate them — and if he does, he is never at a 
loss for something to hate, and may live 
most of the time on a mental diet of gall and 
wormwood. Squalor, crudeness, bad man- 
ners and bad grammar; bad music and art 
in every sort, ill-fitting clothes and inhar- 
mony of colors, nearly drive him to insanity. 
i6 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

There are many lovers of music who are 
so painfully critical that they rarely enjoy it 
much because they instinctively find them- 
selves pained by every trifling defect, which 
they perhaps alone are capable of perceiving. 
While they listen their souls lose the 
inspiration which they deserve and which 
the less critical have. They are comparing 
the performance with some other one, like a 
judge who must render a verdict or award a 
premium. So they miss the ennobling and 
sweet influence which music has for us — 
they, the very people who ought to be capa- 
ble of getting the most of joy out of it. 

Hypercriticism in art, literature and dec- 
oration imposes on us similar penalties. 
We take the unction to our souls that high 
refinement in taste enables us to enjoy so 
much more acutely as to counterbalance the 
discomforts and the penalties. For it is 
only by such a theory that we are able to 
make out in the end a balance of gain for all 
our labor and alleged development. Other- 
wise we should be distinctly the losers by the 
growth. I hope the theory is correct. 

The happiest people are not the highly 
wrought; those excessively developed in a 
particular direction, however much they may 
in their lives enrich the community; but 

17 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

rather the common middle class of folk who 
are not censoriously particular about their 
tidiness or their grammar. Manifold 
annoyances of the critical class are to them 
unheard of. They work and play and snooze 
on oblivious of many such frets and worries 
as beset their hypersensitive neighbors. 
These last — the hyperesthetics — are, with 
the squalid poor whose spirits are broken by 
their struggles, the real unfortunates of the 
world. 

There is another penalty of taste in the 
mental fatigue to the artistic temperament 
from sights and sounds that cannot be shut 
out. 

Some of us dull ones go along through life 
most of the time only half noticing the sights 
about us, and then rarely with any sense of 
their symmetry and beauty, or the contrary. 
So that once in a while, when we do arouse 
ourselves to look contemplatively at our 
environment, we see beauties and interest 
that we usually fail to notice ; they are new 
and fresh to us; we are disillusioned and 
reillusioned by them. 

But the artistic temperament sees every- 
thing, and sees it all the time, and with an 
eye to the beauty or the ugliness of it all. 
It is rested and comforted by certain things 
i8 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

and tired and irritated by others, and finally- 
fatigued by the things that first comforted. 
It feasts on them, the sights and scenes 
around it, and tires of them one after 
another. The fatigue shows itself in the 
desire to get away, to have new scenes and 
air and objects — a new atmosphere. 

So the man, tired of the old, rushes off 
after fresh impressions. He is then charmed 
into ecstasy with a very ugly thing if only it 
is novel and not of his commonplaces. From 
the finished streets and walks and fronts of 
the trim town, what a delight to such a soul 
to get out and find a tangled wood, a 
neglected brook or a dilapidated shanty with 
weeds and grass growing about it, and a man 
or a woman with rude clothes and disheveled 
appearance! He calls this sort of thing 
artistic; it is fine material for an artist's 
brush and he glories and revels in it and will 
travel miles to sketch it. But from the stand- 
point of the eternally beautiful it is absurd 
to say that it is artistic. It is only food for 
the avid artist because it is unusual and 
widely different from the sights and scenes 
that are daily ground into his impressionable 
brain. His very composition compels him 
to observe everything about him, every hour 
of the day, and always with pleasure or 

19 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

pain, and therefore with emotion. Mr. 
Whistler and Mr. Hopkinson-Smith have 
given us fine revelations of this yearning, 
and how to gratify it — and examples could 
be multiplied into volumes. 

The artist's nature is an emotional one and 
must see things with pleasure and pain ; and 
the emotions tire like the laboring muscles 
and must have rest and change ; and when 
the change comes it is such a joy that we 
seem to have no other way to express our- 
selves but to say that the medium of it is 
artistic. So we have created a new meaning 
for a word. 

This then is the penalty for having the 
emotional, the artistic taste and temper- 
ament. Like a wolf the penalty follows such 
natures — the emotional, the esthetic, the 
impressionable — through life ; it makes them 
enjoy and suffer more keenly than the rabble 
can, and compels them to seek changes of 
many sorts. They are constantly hunting 
for some new thing and in multiplied ways. 
This longing and seeking constitute the 
basis of changing fashions — the varying of 
things because of our sole desire for change, 
makes the ebb and flow of fashion. And to 
what minute details and in how many direc- 
tions are there fashions to change! In 
20 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

clothes and other personal belongings, in 
dwellings and their decorations, in manners 
and language, ' in the amenities of life — in 
everything the sensitive nature is touched 
by, or touches. 

Does any one doubt that this constant seek- 
ing, this ardor for change is a penalty? Let 
him then contemplate the fortunes of the 
simple, dull people, pleased with little, but 
pleased and unworried; who never tire of 
their simple surroundings and lot, who never 
have "nervous prostration," nor require a 
change of scene to save them from the 
asylum, and then say if the life of man in 
this world — whether in groveling, or in the 
hidden by-paths, or in glory — ^has not its 
sufi&cient compensations. 

The severest penalty of high taste, the one 
most harmful to the career of man, consists 
in the fact that it often stands in the way 
of his ambitions. It prevents our worldly 
practical efficiency ; it robs us of the main 
chance and keeps us to the outside track in 
the race, when we are striving to get to the 
inside one. 

How does it do all this? By making us 
irascible, easily irritated or crushed in spirit 
and so thrown off our balance, even stam- 
peded by the veriest trifles. For this reason 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

we tire too readily ; have neurasthenia, and 
require vacations. Our enemies who would 
see us fail understand they' can any time 
spoil our equanimity and cause us to be ridi- 
culous, by some trifling act or word they 
know will hit our vulnerable spot. They 
know the nature of our tinder and what will 
fire it, and we are at their mercy. But acci- 
dents are as likely to unman us. A stray 
splash of mud strikes our new clothes and 
we are too weak to perform our part in the 
day's program, unless it be a program of 
battle. If it is a social or a quasi social one 
we are undone for any effective action. 

I once knew a really great man to make a 
fool of himself, storming at everybody about 
him, because some fellow had approached 
him in his official capacity, without observing 
all the proprieties. A superior and refined 
woman is worried and made cross and sick, 
by a slight breach of the best table manners 
on the part of some member of her family. 
Hysteria and other and worse fits of sick- 
ness; losses in business; losses of battles 
even, occur from just this kind of infirmity 
of our poor human nerves. 

The absent-mindedness of the nagged man 
and of the man humiliated, leads to many 
failures Annoyed and irritated he is inca- 

22 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

pable of remembering what is said to him or 
what he reads. Retention in the memory, 
and mental performances for action, require 
for their best success mental tranquillity, 
freedom from the emotion of annoyance. 
(The emotion of annoyance often goes by 
other names, as anger, jealousy, envy and 
hate.) Moved by this emotion, preoccupied, 
forgetful, a man orders the wrong bill of 
goods, or turns the signal the wrong way 
and makes a collision, or sends the regiment 
the wrong way into battle and to certain de- 
feat. For the time he has lost utterly the 
most useful mental traits for success in life, 
namely imperturbability and power of con- 
centration on the subject in hand. He who 
can always be proof against perturbation is 
the man most sure to triumph. He is most 
of all to be envied, for he cannot be stam- 
peded. Other things being equal, the suc- 
cessful clans and races are those that can 
make themselves proof against the things, 
little things mainly, that nonplus and exas- 
perate. It is the unsymmetrical and weak, 
the degenerates, that are most obnoxious to 
such influences. The superior success in 
almost every sort of material undertaking 
that has in modern times always characterized 
the Jewish people is a distinct illustration 

23 



THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 

of this truth. They have the regnant power 
of concentration and continuity. 

It is hard to keep the human genus plumb. 
We are prone to swing too far in one direc- 
tion or the other. Taste is calculated to help 
us; up to a certain point it does; it is a 
guiding power within us for success — the 
success we covet and need. But when it is 
over-developed and erethismic, and the 
touch of our unavoidable environment 
makes an explosion imminent, and we be- 
come hysterical children instead of balanced 
people with powers to endure and to exe- 
cute, then and so far taste is a misfortune. 
We are humiliated and harmed by the thing 
that should help and ennoble us ; we are be- 
coming the worn out of the world, the passi 
of the race. If we cannot succeed in mod- 
erating our intensity we had better pray for 
a little of the dullness and apathy of the clod, 
to the end that our nerves may be rested 
and our tribe, after some generations, may 
come back to the simple lines and better bal- 
ance of those people who are the bed-rock of 
society, and so the hope of the future. 



24 



Two Kinds of Conscience 



Two Kinds of Conscience 



The motives that move men to conduct are 
always an interesting study. One of the 
most enjoyable satisfactions of life is to 
feel certain of how others would act under a 
given set of circumstances. We especially 
like to believe we know where to find those 
we esteem, on all sorts of occasions, as Grant 
felt about Sheridan. It is of all things de- 
sirable. We have great satisfaction in think- 
ing we know how men will act, and we clas- 
sify them with some strictness according to 
this supposed knowledge. Some will, in our 
imagination, always do right, or what we 
think is right ; others, always wrong ; some 
will always be superior, others trivial ; others 
still, vain or envious or resentful or hateful 
or foolish. We have the catalogue fairly 
well formed and definite as to a large num- 
ber of people we know of; as to others, it is 
more vague. 

27 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

But we are repeatedly thrown out of our 
reckoning by finding that people we had put 
into a particular list have somehow gotten 
into another one. Some one whom we had 
catalogued as thoroughly bad is, to our sur- 
prise and disappointment, discovered doing 
a very good and wholly unselfish act, while 
some human god we had created suddenly 
falls ; a man we thought a model of refine- 
ment is found acting and uttering rank vul- 
garity ; while some supposedly crude nature 
suddenly surprises us with evidences of the 
highest superiority. This is all very con- 
fusing. 

One might think that from a knowledge 
of our own motives of action it would be 
easy to divine the springs of action for peo- 
ple in general. But nothing could be more 
fallacious, for, in the first place, we rarely 
analyze our own motives and their interac- 
tion upon each other. Yet we are forever 
speculating on the why of the performances 
of others, and have not the slightest hesita- 
tion about attributing motives and reasons 
for every act. In doing this, however, we 
usually do not agree — some of us guess one 
motive to govern in a particular course of 
conduct, others another, and there is an end- 
less dispute as to why certain people do or 
28 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

have done certain things. Any thoughtful 
study of our own lives must show us that 
to many of our acts, much of our conduct, 
we are moved by a mixture of motives, 
many of them more or less conflicting ; but 
for other people, we too often believe we 
find that but one moving impulse has gov- 
erned, and that not of the highest character. 
It is one of the curiosities of sociological 
study how easily we find reasons that are sat- 
isfactory to us for all sorts of things, and es- 
pecially for that thing most recondite and 
difficult to find out, the true basis of action 
of other human beings. If a man's spinal 
column happens to grow with certain curves 
that make the body stand erect, with the 
head thrown back, we are, many of us, sure 
to think he is proud and top-lofty. If the 
wrinkles on his face happen to give it a so- 
ber cast, we almost instinctively associate 
with him the idea of funereal gloom or self- 
righteousness, forgetting that some of the 
saddest men of the world are those who 
make the most fun and appear the most 
cheerful. We even accuse the horses and 
dogs of vanity and pride if they happen to 
carry their heads high and have arching 
necks, so unfair and unjudicial are our judg- 
ments of living things. 
29 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

If it is true, and it certainly is, that our 
vital conduct or moral acts are determined 
by a mixture of motives, then it must be that 
these are more or less conflicting. A partic- 
ular act is the result of a balance of the 
motives ; if one of these were a little stronger, 
or another a little weaker, the act would be 
different. One motive or emotion existing 
within us to a high degree overcomes all 
opposing ones and so determines the act. 
Then, too, as we might expect to find, with 
the changing conditions of our surround- 
ings and of our physical state, the emotions 
vary somewhat; now, a particular one is 
strong, another weak; to-morrow or next 
month the relations will be reversed, and so 
varying results in conduct. 

As the conduct determined by this shifting 
of motives, emotions and governing princi- 
ples is sure to have a moral quality, and as 
this quality of our acts gives that something 
to the man which we call character, it hap- 
pens that every man has several moral sides 
(whether the world discovers them or not), 
several different phases of character. No- 
body with any power and effectiveness 
among people probably ever wholly es- 
capes this fluctuation in character and con- 
duct. Those most nearly escape it who have 

30 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

a few motives and emotions so powerful as 
to be able with substantial constancy to 
dominate all the rest ; they are strong be- 
cause uniform. But most persons endlessly 
vary little or much in moral quality accord- 
ing to any standard you may name. 

As fixity of purpose is desirable (a high 
purpose being always implied) and always 
is sought, we struggle to develop certain 
emotions and directing impulses so that as 
guides to conduct they shall be infallible or 
nearly so. 

But in spite of us, they are more or less 
fallible always, and they fluctuate in de- 
gree and change in character. So it may be 
said that every man has more than one, most 
people have several, different shades of char- 
acter and emotional promptings, as they 
have under different circumstances differing 
orders of taste and sentiment. 

Certain emotional qualities of the mind 
grow till they become nearly the controlling 
element in the character, and they tip the 
beam in many of the daily acts of life. This 
mental something is connected with beliefs, 
opinions and education; it is a matter of 
growth. But it is, for the present study, of 
less consequence how the quality is created ; 
it is more important that it exists and that 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

it governs and dominates other qualities. 
From childhood to age we all have some 
snch controlling motives. There are no ex- 
ceptions to the rule; even the abnormal 
natures, the degenerates, follow the rule as 
much as others do. 

The most profound knowledge of man, 
therefore, is to know the force and nature 
of these directing springs in his thinking and 
his life. The controlling force is the man ; 
for it is like a hypnotizing other human na- 
ture that can within certain limits control all 
his usually voluntary acts and create for him 
his moral character. 

This governing principle, this guide of 
action, which gives a standard of conduct and 
judgment to every man, is known by various 
names, as emotion, instinct, emotional ideas, 
motives, principles and, finally, conscience. 
The word conscience is convenient ; it means 
to us more than the others and seems more 
intimately connected with the moral qualities 
of people. Conscience, as we ordinarily con- 
ceive it, is a guide of action that distinguishes 
between right and wrong ; it is the moral 
mentor within a man for his own acts and by 
which he judges the acts of others; it is the 
power within that, modified by the influences 
of the environment, leads to a definite and 

32 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

fairly constant course of action. But con- 
science is largely a matter of education. To 
a moderate degree it is inborn and there- 
fore instinctive. Applied to things, beliefs 
and principles, it is substantially all ac- 
quired. From the same family of children 
you may, with the necessary favoring influ- 
ences, develop the most opposite beliefs on 
politics, religion and the right treatment of 
others — the most divergent conceptions of 
right and wrong. 

After one has by his birth, growth and 
surroundings acquired a conscience guide, 
he finds himself with not one, but per- 
haps several, and they are often in con- 
flict with each other; now one controls, now 
another, and in most things their influence 
is somewhat mingled. One result of this fact 
is the moods of life, always varying and vari- 
able. A man cannot direct all his acts by 
the same and the one impulse and motive, 
however he may try ; yet one emotion may, 
and probably does in the main, rule him, 
and at one time he may hate himself for hav- 
ing been governed at another time by a cer- 
tain motive, as when he buys a book he 
neither wants nor needs because he is asked 
to by an attractive woman, or contributes 
too liberally at a public collection because a 

33 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

woman pleads with him and the audience is 
g-azing- at him in his blushes. He is not gov- 
erned by the same conscience at all times; 
or, rather, his conscience does not at all 
times carry him to the same line, nor can it. 
Stupendous efforts are constantly made to 
influence the actions and attitudes of persons 
and peoples, of judges and juries ; the real 
purpose is mostly to change or vary the con- 
science or standard of judgment. If the 
judgment can be changed the conduct is 
likely to be also. But a man's digestion, 
whether he is fed or hungry, his degree of 
fatigue, his emotions regarding the things 
and people aroimd him, whether they have 
nagged or conciliated him, and love or hate 
him, whether he is flattered or censured — all 
these and many more influences vary his 
conduct, even when he fancies he is living 
by the same rule. And men differ from each 
other, no two probably having identical con- 
science guides; they show thus the normal 
variations of the race. 

In one aspect, these standards of action 
fall naturally into two classes or orders dif- 
fering vitally from each other. For want of 
more fit designations, one may be called the 
personal or individual, the other the com- 
pany, class or collective conscience. Many 

34 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

other classifications could be made, but this 
is a natural one ; it is also a help to a fair 
and proper interpretation of many phases 
of human conduct that have caused the phi- 
losophers and historians no end of trouble. 
These standards obtain with people of all 
ages and conditions, and they are well-nigh 
universal. In having these two distinct 
forms of conscience all men are alike — the 
classification is self-suggestive. 

The individual standard is perhaps the 
higher, as it is the more interesting, al- 
though probably the less potent. It impels 
a man to do what he alone believes he ought 
to do. It is the standard personal; and 
might also be called the deliberative stand- 
ard ; it is the conscience of the solitude and 
tranquillity of the soul, of the man commun- 
ing with himself, of the man uninfluenced — 
or when he tries to believe himself uninflu- 
enced — by his environment, for to be wholly 
uninfluenced by environment rarely happens 
to any one in his deliberative moods, and to 
most people never happens. The personal 
standard has many drawbacks, and is beset 
by many difficulties and conflicting influences ; 
moreover, it is completely followed by only 
a few, although it gives the cue and direction 
to very much of the company conscience. 

35 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

The collective conscience is the standard 
of the man in a company, a crowd or a guild. 
It is an altogether different standard from 
the personal one. The two are often in con- 
flict, although they are often completely 
concordant. The feelings and impulses that 
belong to this standard are in general the ever 
present emotions of mankind. Collective 
conscience implies a mutualness of interests 
and of duty. All must act, outwardly at 
least, modified always by the personal sel- 
fishness normal to the race, for the benefit 
of the company. So universal and strong is 
this feeling that violation of it is frowned 
upon or otherwise punished. It is the con- 
science of the majority, which insists that it 
shall be respected by all, even if some do 
not fully agree with it. Having been the 
standard of the majority, and had the loyalty 
of most of the class, we from habit often fol- 
low it after the majority have in their indi- 
vidual minds repudiated it. It is the execu- 
tive, the official conscience. With it is often, 
or generally, coupled a fellowship feeling, 
an unwritten law or tenet, that the interests 
and acts of the company are sacred from the 
rest of mankind : hence informers and spies 
are regarded as infamous. A crowd of haz- 
ing students (always of the close corporation 

36 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

of a school class), a mob bent on mischief or 
revenge, a body of strikers after their rights, 
a band of revolutionists, or a dozen boys or 
girls out for a lark; these equally show the 
common understanding of the inviolability of 
the acts and secrets of the company. 

A boy of fourteen lay sick with some in- 
flammation inside his abdomen. He was a 
remarkably fine nature, bright and ambi- 
tious, but always tractable, and uncommonly 
truthful. What was more uncommon, he 
lived in confidential relations with his par- 
ents. He even went to them with many of 
his perplexities that boys are usually unable 
to talk to their fathers and mothers about, 
but discuss with their older and bolder play- 
mates. He was in agony now, and it was 
thought the inflammation might have been 
caused by an injury, but when interrogated 
the boy denied it; and when his mother 
asked him if he had been in any scrape with 
the boys and been hurt, he looked her 
squarely in the face with the gaze of honest 
confidence and said to her: "Why do you ask 
such a question? Of course not. " Later in 
the sickness he became delirious and, in his 
raving, revealed how he had gotten into 
some scuffle with his fellows and been vio- 
lently kicked in the abdomen by one of 

37 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

them, a boy considerably older than himself. 
There was no doubt now that this was the 
cause of the sickness. He never afterwards 
came back to full consciousness, but died 
without knowing he had unwittingly be- 
trayed the boys of his set. The knowledge 
would have disturbed his conscience and 
shocked his sense of honor unspeakably, and 
it was a mercy that he was spared such a hu- 
miliation. 

In a hospital amphitheater were gathered 
some scores of senior medical students to 
witness a clinic by a great surgeon. The 
operations to be done in their presence were 
formidable and dangerous, and all the pa- 
tients were known to be women. The assist- 
ants brought one of the patients, on a roller 
table, to the door of the amphitheater, and 
halted as the surgeon preceded them into 
the room. As he entered, the students, from 
the mixed motives of pleasure at his coming 
and the prospect of seeing an operation, 
broke into hand clapping and foot stamping, 
garnished by stray yells and whistles from 
concealed voices. The surgeon had more 
than once told the class that on operation 
days there must be no demonstration or 
noise of any sort to frighten or wound the 

38 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

feelings of the patients or their friends. The 
class was composed in the main of fine fel- 
lows, not one of whom would have yelled or 
clapped his hands had he been the only man 
waiting for the exhibition ; nor would he have 
been one of four or even ten — then he would 
have been individualized and identifiable. 
But one of a hundred, the man instinctively 
felt himself merged in the mass, and his acts 
were governed by a different motive. More- 
over, not a man but would have burned with 
a sense of outrage at the performance had 
the patient been his mother or his sister. 
The Professor now hesitated an instant, col- 
ored a trifle, then promptly dismissed the 
class, saying there would be "no clinic to- 
day," and retired from the amphitheater 
to do his surgery in the private operating 
room. The students were dumfounded; 
they looked at each other a moment, and 
then slowly filed out of the building. They 
had come a mile or two to see this clinic and 
felt a sense of chagrin at being defrauded of 
it. They began to regard themselves as 
having been insulted. This clinic was on the 
program and they had been invited to attend 
it; they had gotten up early and taken a 
hasty breakfast, to be there, and now had 
been sent away without a word; it was an 

39 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

outrage. They went back to their college 
and held a meeting to consider their griev- 
ance. It soon became an indignation meet- 
ing, notwithstanding the protests of a few 
who were cried down ; and a committee was 
sent to the Professor to ask for some ex- 
planation or satisfaction. When he told the 
committee that he had nothing to say — that 
he had said all he cared to or needed to — the 
members were satisfied they had come on a 
fool's errand, that the class had made a mis- 
take ; and had their courage been equal to it, 
they would gladly have gone back to their 
fellows and said so. But it was evident that 
they did not dare to do this, it required more 
nerve than they had to confront the class 
empty-handed, and so they pleaded with him 
for some word that would harmonize things. 
They really wanted some statement that 
would appear to be an apology on his part, 
to take back to their classmates; and an 
hour was spent in vain discussion. He 
finally divined the predicament of the com- 
mittee and generously gave them some state- 
ment the half of which they could go back 
and tell and make to appear to be a conces- 
sion, and the other half keep silence about, all 
of which they did. The tempestuous natures 
in the class had been conciliated, the wise 
40 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

ones saw the joke, and the incident was at 
an end. These events illustrate well the 
crowd conscience and what it does for us, 
and such incidents are of daily occurrence. 

One expression of the collective conscience 
is fashion, and people obey it; it is the ''cor- 
rect thing' ' to do. That they follow it so im- 
plicitly is only proof of its pervading force. 
Fashions in clothes, in modes of speech, in 
table manners, and the use of calling cards, 
are the least of the customs of society that 
express the collective conscience. A woman 
or man who violates in a flagrant way the 
fashion in anything is as promptly aware of 
the penalty for the offense as is the college 
boy who informs on his fellows, or a criminal 
who turns state's evidence. The penalty 
may not be severe, but it is always felt. 

Neither of the two sorts of conscience can 
ever be followed completely; the class con- 
science is more likely to be obeyed implicitly 
than the other, for there are many people 
who do seem to have no real minds of their 
own but who follow where the company leads, 
without hesitation and without question. 
The standards often conflict, and there are 
emotions and impulses that draw the strug- 
gling soul (that does know itself) toward 
each as against the other, a conflict that 
41 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

often leads to behavior that is curious, even 
queer and contradictory, and to some that 
seems at first completely inexplicable, save 
on the unnecessary theory of temporary lu- 
nacy. The greatest historical character of 
the century illustrated this truth in his early 
life. 

A citizen of Chicago once many years ago 
received calls from two young men on the 
same day and within an hour of each other. 
He was honored with the confidence of each, 
which opened his eyes as to some of the absurd 
things that rational beings are capable of 
doing at the behest of what they regard as 
the fashion. One of the men was a long-time 
neighbor ; the other was a stranger who said 
he was from New York. Each of them had 
red and swollen eyes, trembling hands and 
that general nervousness and agitation that 
often come from either genuine grief or 
over-stimulation. It developed as to each 
that it was both genuine gfrief and over- 
stimulation that was the trouble; only, the 
grief was of that day, because of the de- 
bauchery of the day before. The first one 
apologized for his condition and explained it 
by saying that he had not touched liquor for 
many months and did not like it anyway, 
but he had received a visit from a young 
42 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

gentleman from the East, who had come with 
a letter of introduction from a friend who 
begged him to show the stranger any cour- 
tesy he could. Of course, nothing but a 
champagne dinner would do ; and, of course, 
willing or unwilling, he had to drink with 
his guest. "But did the man intimate that 
he expected a champagne dinner, or to be 
made drunk?" "Oh no, he was a gentleman 
about it and protested that he did not care 
for it and urged me not to order it on his ac- 
count. But I knew he expected it, they all 
do, and I had to do it. ' ' The second young 
man also apologized for his appearance, and 
said that at home he never had occasion to 
call on any one in such a state, for at home 
he never drank at all, but he had been too 
highly entertained by a gentleman in Chi- 
cago to whom he had brought a letter. "I 
didn't want to drink his liquor," he said, 
"but he insisted on it; and, of course, it 
would have been a discourtesy both to him 
and to my friend who gave me the letter, if 
I had refused." 

Each of these men had sufficiently demon- 
strated his own cowardice ; for it is only a 
coward who can offer such an excuse for a 
debauch if it is not strictly true ; and if it 
was true in either case, then the man had 

43 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

confessed his weakness towards what was to 
him class conscience. 

The human love of approbation must be 
considered in any study of this subject. It 
is the determining influence of much of hu- 
man conduct, and colors the character of 
mankind. The dread of censure is a com- 
plementary emotion and is always linked 
with the love of applause. And there are so 
many kinds of approbation and censure, and 
from many sources! The approbation of 
one's own judgment and best sense is one; 
the applause of the company is another. 
Then, the impulsive applause of to-day may 
turn to the censure of to-morrow or some 
other morrow, when the company has had 
time to think and separate and its members 
be alone a little and listen to the prompt- 
ings of the personal conscience. We may 
gain the applause of the hour, and be sure 
of self-censure perpetually; or we may have 
perfect self-satisfaction in an act with a cer- 
tainty of after self-chastisement, if not blame 
from the community. So go on the strug- 
gle and the conflict. Men overcome and dis- 
regard their present impulses in the hope of 
after approval of themselves and their world. 
They face danger and death rather than 
yield to their physical fear, and take the 

44 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

avalanche that is sure to follow. The battle- 
fields of war furnish great examples of this ; 
but these are few and trifling compared to 
those of the manifold struggles in the moral 
battles of mankind that forever go unre- 
corded. The fear of after condemnation that 
makes one control his shaking knees in the 
face of danger and do his duty for the appro- 
bation to follow, is the same fear that often 
makes us quail before a fashion or popular 
notion that is innately ignoble and altogether 
beneath us. 

The presence of a crowd moving in a given 
direction easily makes a man forget his per- 
sonal standard. This is notoriously true 
when the crowd is stirred by a strong emo-- 
tion of ambition or dislike or fear. The 
moving impulse becomes suddenly right and 
we join the procession. A quiet neighbor of 
mine, a man never known to do an ungentle 
thing before, was seen once, in a surging 
crowd at a box office window, to push aside 
a small woman with whom he was unac- 
quainted and take her place to get his ticket 
first. Meeting her on the street or any- 
where with his personal conscience in con- 
trol, he would have been the embodiment of 
deference and courtesy. Soldiers in battle 
as long as they are most of them controlled 

45 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

by their crowd conscience on the side of 
courage and discipline, keep their ranks and 
fight well. The courage of the large major- 
ity holds up the few shaky ones — the ex- 
ample is infectious. But let them, or a 
majority of them, be seized with the crowd 
sentiment of fear, and they break in a panic 
and actually trample on their fellows for 
their own individual safety. The tragedy 
of the Bridge of the Beresina in the retreat 
from Moscow was only more disgraceful to the 
race than many others, and more shows the 
brutality that is in it, because the conditions 
happened to be such as to make it possible 
for so many to be killed — so many as to 
make islands of dead bodies in the river; 
islands that have remained to this day. But 
the same mad rush and forgetfulness have 
occurred a million times and will continue to 
occur as the accidents of life favor, perhaps 
a little less often as we rise, if we do rise ; 
but they will not cease, nor should we ex- 
pect them to. 

It is not possible to have a personal con- 
science dissociated from the interests, real or 
supposed, of the individual. Human indi- 
vidual selfishness is unavoidable and neces- 
sary. What is best for him, or what he 
thinks is best for him, will more or less gov- 
46 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

ern every man ; what is absolutely right for 
him, wholly apart from self-interest, it is 
hard for him to say, and candid men say it 
variously. No two state it exactly in the 
same way; and so for each man there is a 
personal conscience, an individual standard 
of right, differing a little from that of every 
other one. One judge will accept a pass on 
a railroad and probably not cease to be an 
honest judge; another refuses all such fa- 
vors, and even compels his daughters to 
return gifts sent them by rich lady friends. 

To the personal standard there can be no 
fashion — or custom, which is the same thing. 
Fashion means a doing of something because 
others do it or have done it ; and to the in- 
dividual conscience pure and simple, such a 
thing is impossible. But the fact that no 
wholesome and sane nature is entirely free 
from the influence of customs (even those 
that are disapproved of) is proof that nobody 
is wholly and constantly governed by the 
personal conscience. That men are con- 
trolled by it at times completely, and in 
some degree generally, is encouraging for 
the future of the race. 

The individual standard is higher than the 
collective one ; the personal is greater than 
the crowd conscience. It is farther removed 

47 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

from barbarism ; more comes of it and from 
it ; it is most potent for good, and most real 
and high good comes of it. It must be 
diviner. It is the hope of the world against 
the mob, the panic, the stampede of the 
army, and the frenzy and bad fashions of 
the less thinking rabble. It makes a man 
walk without fear or guile and welcome the 
light ; it gives the most rest and comfort of 
mind, and least taxes the memory to be sure 
what falsehoods may have been told. It is 
the result of that philosophy that has satis- 
faction in its doing, if not in itself ; it takes 
a man above the need of applause and praise 
from his fellows and makes him proof against 
the hisses of the crowd — if he only knows he 
is true to the standard. It means, as far as it 
goes, self-containment and imperturbability 
— two qualities of mind that all men may 
well covet. With these qualities, homesick- 
ness as a disease is impossible, and one has 
courage to defy the unreasonable behests of 
the collective standard; with these qualities, 
such exhibitions are possible, as of Thomas 
at Chickamauga, and Phillips in Faneuil Hall 
amid the hisses of the multitude when de- 
fending the act of Love joy as higher than 
that of the Revolutionary Fathers. 

But the collective standard is necessary. 
48 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

It needs regulating, but it cannot be abol- 
ished. The company conscience is unavoid- 
able. It is the first and earliest standard ; it 
comes in childhood and is more instinctive, 
but it is nearer barbarism. Barbarism is 
more selfish, perhaps, than modern civilized 
society; it is surely more cruel. Not the 
strongest, perhaps, but one of the earliest 
attributes of childhood, especially the mas- 
culine side of it, after imagination, is 
cruelty, especially to animals. The boy is 
a soldier, always with sword and gun, and 
always to slay or to lord it over others; 
he is rarely a private, doing camp duty ; but 
a bandit, a robber, an Indian or a pirate, 
and is always victorious ; he never surren- 
ders. Many a boy must run away from home 
and try to be an outlaw before he is disil- 
lusioned, and returns to more rational lines. 
The boy always imagines himself a man 
and imitates what he regards as a man's, or 
a manly older boy's ways; but his notion of 
manliness is liable to warping, and he is 
very apt to take for his hero the wildest man 
or the most daring and nonchalant boy. And 
after he has developed an ambition to re- 
semble the modem creditable man of high 
character, he will occasionally enjoy break- 
ing away from his standard and, with some 

49 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

ruder boy, will become for an hour a bandit 
or a soldier again. He drops from the higher 
to the lower level and rises back again in 
that brief period. Your girl may early show 
a perfectly inhuman cruelty to pet animals, 
and occasionally to other children — attri- 
butes she may never again reveal, except as 
a woman under the stress of jealousy and 
hate. 

Every one has the crowd conscience to some 
degree; we may pretend to the contrary, 
but the pretense is shallow and unbecom- 
ing. The crowd conscience makes collect- 
ive action possible; and such action, and 
with force, is necessary to the community. 
Society were impossible without it; other- 
wise, adverse forces and the enemies of the 
community would destroy it. The collect- 
ive conscience expresses itself in numerous 
conservative usages for the common good. 
These are when analyzed only forms of fash- 
ion ; and so great a sentiment as patriotism 
is one of them. Fashion rules the world, it 
may be ; but fashion is the expression of the 
collective standard. We prate about the 
vacillation and changes of fashions as though 
there was no stability in them ; but it is only 
a paltry few that change often; and because 
they mean labor and cost to us we notice 

50 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

them and forget that they are not all there 
is of the ways of the world. Most fashions 
last through centuries, some of them many 
centuries, and all because they are founded 
on the primal needs of the race. 

Some of the unwholesome results of the 
collective standard are mobs, popular upris- 
ings of frenzy and foolishness, stampedes 
of soldiers, of audiences and crowds; mob 
jail-breakings and hangings; many college 
hazings and other pranks annoying to neigh- 
borhoods. These examples are no more phe- 
nomenal than the hasty, ill-considered and 
inconsiderate expressions of popular senti- 
ment shown in the general clamor and in 
popular elections sometimes. Popular senti- 
ment is generally safe and reliable, but after 
the people have stopped to think, not al- 
ways in the haste of first thought and hot 
feeling. The class conscience, especially in 
haste, is capable of being as cruel and mer- 
ciless as any tyrant conceivable. 

Another result of the class standard is the 
blind following of custom because it is cus- 
tom, and the short-sighted condemnation or 
social rejection of some good people because 
they have followed their individual con- 
sciences too much, even when they have 
done no harm to the community. But from 

51 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

the collective conscience come patriotism, or 
much of it; churches, guilds and parties of 
all sorts ; union of forces in general for the 
common benefit ; good order and security in 
society, respect for personal and property 
rights ; and many of the emotions that make 
the blessed individual and collective com- 
panionships of human life. The personal 
conscience would have to create, if it did not 
already exist, a company conscience for the 
security, as well as the pleasure, of society. 
Society could not exist otherwise. 

The individual standard has little enthu- 
siasm about foot-ball and yacht-racing; and 
political campaigns would lose a vast deal 
of their force and meaning if left to it ; so 
would all movements for the relief of dis- 
tress and the betterment of mankind. It 
is the class conscience that most pushes for 
excellence and success in every direction of 
community, class or guild interest ; it makes 
the world move. But it may be temporarily 
foolish and blind and make the world move 
wrong. It comes back finally to the right 
track, albeit with some energy wasted. 
Class conscience persecuted the witches and 
has practiced all manner of religious intoler- 
ance and cruelty; but then, it gave us the 
Declaration of Independence and abolished 

52 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

human slavery. In all such instances, it is 
true that from first to last both standards are 
involved, the individual one at first, but the 
execution is always with the community im- 
pulses. 

So, while we laud the individual conscience 
and look to it to modify and control, within 
limits, the collective one — it does this some- 
what, but ought to do it more— we must not 
despise the company conscience, which we 
all have, for it is indispensable, even if it 
does somehow and sometime make cowards 
of us all. 

The question of questions is how to re- 
strict within wholesome limits the operations 
of the collective standard; how to prevent 
the mobs and brutality, the needless hard- 
ships, and still leave it ready to defend the 
public rights and occasionally by a burst of 
fury to sweep away some colossal public 
abuse or wrong, that may have grown upon 
the people by insidious steps or been left be- 
hind as a relic of the by-gone in the march 
of a nation to higher levels. 

A few lessons are paramount. We should 
never fail (as we usually do) to calculate on 
the possibility of a stampede whenever a 
mass of people are gathered together, 
whether it is an audience, a picnic party or 

53 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

an army, or when new influences or ideas 
are suddenly brought to the public attention. 
The veriest trijEles may on occasion precipi- 
tate a rush that is as wild and blind and as 
heartless as the behavior of a herd of cattle. 
It is one of the possibilities of our kind, and 
thoughtful minds should not invite their own 
disappointment by forgetting this, nor suffer 
the existence of death-traps of any kind by 
failing to provide numerous exits, wide pas- 
sage ways, and abundant reserves to prevent 
or cover a retreat. Never forget the possi- 
bility of even a good popular sentiment tak- 
ing the masses off their feet. 

Then, profit comes of cultivating self-poise 
and individual judgment and action. With 
our constitution of society, independent per- 
sonal action and responsibility are the prom- 
ise of progress. The truly independent 
thinker is the hope of the political world ; 
as he is in a lesser degree of the social 
world also. 

The mere fact that one or two men in a 
hundred are known to be uninfluenced by 
the clamor of any rabble, good or bad, is to 
any community a force of unspeakable value. 
The excitable ones know well that the fiftieth 
man must be met and conciliated or overcome 
in any hot-headed movement. He is a fac- 

54 



TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 

tor as a voter and a citizen that cannot be 
ignored, and he exercises a wholesome reg- 
ulating and modifying, often repressive, in- 
fluence on the hasty tendencies of the crowd. 
The thieves of the public treasury, of all 
classes and shades, are afraid of him. Even 
one forceful man in a hundred thousand 
may have an amazing influence on public 
affairs, if he has the time and inclination to 
devote to disinterested care of the public in- 
terests. There are a few such men in each 
of our large cities. In one of the large cen- 
ters of the East, a wealthy man of leisure 
was for many years a terror to the hot- 
headed and the filchers of the public ; and 
solely because he gave himself to the task 
and they knew they would have to meet him 
at every turn. This one man in the multi- 
tude may be called a croaker or a fossil ; but 
often he is the sole force that is able to check 
the rising of the mob or the stampede of the 
army, or to compel men to stop and think 
before taking action that may be hasty or 
regrettable. 



55 



Bashfulness : Its Effect on 
Life and Character 



Bashfulness: Its Effect on 
Life and Character 



If a man has a tender knee-joint he favors 
it in his movements and takes many precau- 
tions to avoid hurting it. He minifies his 
walking, and keeps away from rough side- 
walks. The limping lessens the pain. If the 
defect is permanent, or likely to be, he 
orders his life and selects his vocation and 
avocations so as to escape discomfort in it 
as far as possible. He shuns crowds and 
crushes, athletic activities and a bustling 
life, and looks ahead for danger of a jar 
upon the tender nerves of the vulnerable 
part. He becomes timid and self -watchful ; 
so both his gait and his character are 
changed and in a measure determined by his 
infirmity. He is altogether a different man 
in his life and his place among men by rea- 
son of the one defect; a defect for which he 

59 



BASHFULNESS 

may be in no way responsible. His sensi- 
tiveness to pain and aversion to discomfort, 
as well as to danger, are what shape his gait 
and his life. 

Nobody finds any difficulty in seeing the 
effect on the man of the tender spot in the 
physical body. That a tender emotional spot 
will produce like results is less clearly per- 
ceived. We all understand that mental and 
so-called moral qualities somehow create, if 
they do not constitute, the character of every 
man; but emotions of certain sorts (moral 
qualities themselves) have a powerful influ- 
ence in the same direction. Thus, patriot- 
ism, love of friends and of children, love of 
home or the opposite; hatred of certain 
things, people or institutions — these and 
many other forms of emotional ideas are 
potent in directing and shaping the course 
of the lives of men and women the world 
over. The emotions named are objective; 
they primarily reach outside their possessor 
to people and things, many and diverse; 
they effect forcibly his relations to his envi- 
ronment, and effect his own character. Other 
emotions there are which first directly con- 
cern the individual himself, subjective emo- 
tions, and they are quite as formative of 
character and one's place in the world. Any- 
60 



BASHFULNESS 

thing that forms the character of a man, 
more or less determines his career in life. 
One of the most potent subjective emotions 
of all — doomed to be always neglected and 
unrecognized — is bashfulness, self-conscious- 
ness or diflfidence. Its force is introspective ; 
its possessor is its victim ; and it is the ten- 
der moral knee-joint of mankind. That 
love of approbation and a fear he may not 
acquit himself well, and some conceit at 
times, may be psychologically back of the 
emotion, does not lessen its force on the 
character of the man, however much it may 
suggest as to a remedy. 

The most insistent quality of self-con- 
sciousness is its disagreeableness. It is 
tantamount to chagrin, mortification, embar- 
rassment;* it comes with blushing; it is a jar 
to the feelings that is to be, and, what is 
more, is shunned like a possible blow on a 
sensitive nerve. The shunning and dodging 
due to this fact lead to the most amazing 
changes in the lives of people, as we cannot 
fail to see when we study them even casually 
and look for these effects. 

The trouble is that we usually do not study 
people as to the genesis of their ways, eccen- 
tricities and habits; yet the personal peculi- 
arities of people constitute one of the most 
6i 



BASHFULNESS 

interesting of all subjects. We never tire of 
considering them and reading books about 
them. But the personal peculiarities some- 
how seem to have been bom with people and 
never to have grozi^fi out of psychological 
conditions that are definable, capable of 
study and possibly of correction or better- 
ment. 

In features, conformation and looks no two 
persons are alike ; in ways they are just as 
diverse. We are, I think, rather less im- 
pressed by the looks of folks than by their 
manners and character. For these latter 
mainly we like or dislike or are indifferent 
to sundry persons. We select our friends, 
those we are drawn to and pleased with, if 
we can; we shun the opposite, and ignore 
the vaster mass of mankind, because of these 
attributes. 

We accept the bodily conformation of peo- 
ple as the fate of birth — no man can increase 
or lessen his stature or the length of his nose. 
We mistakenly put the ways of mankind in 
the same category. But the manners of men 
are largely the product of emotions and 
impulses capable of considerable control and 
direction. 

The first cardinal fact we discover in a 
study of the orig^ and growth of character 
62 



BASHFULNESS 

and manners is that the moving thing in the 
life of civilized man is his emotion. The 
word emotion is one of the most misused or 
variously used of the language, but a good 
meaning of it is thought with pleasure or pain, 
that is, thought with feeling. Most of our 
thoughts are emotional, and they are almost 
the only thoughts that determine the con- 
duct of life. The unpleasant things we avoid, 
and the pleasurable- ones we grasp or grasp 
at, and so life is one grand erEort to minify 
our sufferings and enlarge the sum total of 
our enjoyments. We come instinctively to 
shun the impleasant things, and are drawn 
similarly to the pleasant ones; and so our 
emotional promptings are mostly automatic. 

The most moving of all the emotions, es- 
pecially early in life, are those that grow out 
of our relations and association with our 
kind. These relations are vital to most of 
US for good or ill, for pleasure or pain, and 
it is natural to expect that powerful emotions 
would develop from them. 

One of the strongest of all these is that 
curious sense of uneasiness that comes of 
our consciousness of the presence and scru- 
tiny of others. This is both primal and po- 
tent because it is produced by and touches 
man's very initial act as a social being. He 

63 



BASHFULNESS 

cannot meet his fellowmen, especially if he 
has a desire to meet them well, and appear 
before them to advantage (an almost uni- 
versal desire), without danger of this emo- 
tion, and as a matter of fact the emotion 
actually besets nearly all mankind. Boys 
and men have it more than girls and women, 
and it varies with the decades of the individ- 
ual's life, varies both in its quality and in 
its effect on his behavior and character. By 
a large class of boys and men there is rarely 
experienced any purely physical discomfort 
that is comparable to the mental distress of 
bashfulness, diffidence or stage-fright, which 
they seem powerless to avoid whenever they 
are thrown among people outside of their 
few intimates. For this men shun society, 
avoid people and publicity, are even dis- 
courteous to those they would like to culti- 
vate. They blunder and hitch and halt 
under the stress of it, usually appear at their 
worst, and are covered with a sense of em- 
barrassment and humiliation; they cannot 
even make love smoothly. It blights con- 
versation ; the tongue is frozen and thought 
is dead — the man is wooden, he is a block- 
head indeed. He cudgels his brain to think 
of something to say, and then says the wrong 
thing, or thinks afterward that he has said it. 
64 



BASHFULNESS 

He is humiliated by the sense of bashfulness, 
and by the consciousness that he has had it, 
and must have it again on occasion ; and so 
the one uppermost mental impression about 
it is that of intense discomfort and chagrin 
from which almost any escape seems justifi- 
able. 

Can any one doubt that such experiences 
must influence the course of a man's life? 
The wonder is rather that the study of the 
lives of the common people has not long since 
discovered, growing out of this paramount 
emotion, many of their qualities of character 
and conduct. 

Bashfulness not merely often ' shapes the 
character of people, but it fixes the standards 
by which they are judged by the com- 
munity; and a wofuUy unfair and inaccu- 
rate standard it often is. 

How does the emotion produce this 
result? By what it leads us to do or omit in 
order to avoid the consciousness of it. The 
emotion is our tender joint; we dislike it, 
and try by all sorts of queer acts (that oft- 
repeated become automatic) to avoid hurting 
it. We try to mask or cover or hide it, and 
to make ourselves oblivious to it, and the 
results of our effort are grotesque and 
astonishing. 

65 



BASHFULNESS 

It is a curious property of the nervous sys- 
tem that various disagreeable and unfortu- 
nate sensations and emotions can be driven 
away, stopped or altered by other and quite 
minor ones artificially induced. Thus 
squeezing the hand or foot violently just at 
the moment of the beginning of an epileptic 
fit will often stop it. Slight, gentle pressure 
upon the head, or stroking it, may stop its 
aching. The touch of the hand of a friend 
drives away fear, and in a nervous person 
may ward off a fit of hysteria. A fellow 
whistles or sings to keep his courage up, and 
he succeeds. The sound of his own voice 
gives him a feeling of comradeship that makes 
solitude endurable and drives out the appre- 
hension of impending harm. One must 
often walk the floor or wring his hands to 
drive away nervousness; if asked about it 
he will say that it is a vent to the nervous- 
ness. Eugene Feld could not think and 
write at his best unless he had peculiar ink, 
and paper and pen that pleased him; and 
many men can never think so easily as when 
they can sit with their feet elevated ; and cold- 
ness of the feet spoils any creative thought to 
most men. A newspaper writer tries to find 
his ideas or his muse, and they disappoint 
him, but let him begin to chew a toothpick 
66 



BASHFULNESS 

or the end of an unlighted cigar, and his 
thoughts flow like oil. There is some 
physical inhibition to thought and tranquillity 
which diversion of another part of the nerv- 
ous system, as by the cigar or toothpick or 
warmth to the feet, removes or counteracts. 
Bashfulness is disagreeable to us, and not 
merely this, it also inhibits thought and pre- 
vents mental and nervous balance. If we 
can make ourselves unconscious of it, it 
ceases for all practical purposes to exist, and 
so we early fall to doing multifarious things 
to take the place, to our nervous sensibili- 
ties, of this sensation ; to drive away or dis- 
place the inhibitory influence of it, by which 
it prevents thought, action and comfort. A 
man twirls his watch-chain or his mustache 
or his cane, or he wiggles his feet while he 
is talking to you; you hand him a note to 
deliver to a friend, and if he puts it in his 
pocket, well for the note; if he holds it in 
his hand while he still talks, he will handle 
it a dozen times over, and will soil it with 
his fingers till you are ashamed to have your 
friend see it. Once, when Bismarck arose to 
address the Reichstag, he held in his hand 
his quill pen ; had he left that on his desk 
his mental confusion would have been 
gpreater; it was sufficient as it was. Before 
67 



BASHFULNESS 

he had uttered a dozen sentences he had 
unconsciously torn the pen into shreds and 
thrown it bit by bit upon the floor; only 
then had he become so enthused with his 
subject that he forgot his embarrassment 
and his hands. A difl&dent acquaintance 
calls on you for advice ; he sits near you, and 
must touch your chair with his foot before 
he can talk freely. Another strokes his 
beard or twists his face or opens his eyes 
widely at the end or beginning of every sen- 
tence. As long as he is doing some one of 
these maneuvers or tricks he is, to some 
extent at least, unconscious of his diffidence ; 
its inhibitory influence is removed ; the trick 
is a comfort and a satisfaction, and is turned 
to as instinctively as some children suck 
their thumbs for solace. 

Now, when we come to study these tricks 
we discover that they are susceptible of 
classification, as to their essential features, 
their origin and especially as to their influ- 
ence on the character and career of the indi- 
vidual. Some are insignificant, and, to all 
but the very critical, not noticeable ; others 
are apparent to observant persons, but only 
as harmless excrescences of personal ways ; 
while others the world never forgives because 
it regards them as founded in perversity or 
68 



BASHFULNESS 

mental warping, and it judges men by this 
yardstick, and gives them places in the scale 
of the race much lower than they deserve. 
So to the misfortune of bashfulness and the 
tricks they have acquired to parry it, they 
have added the further misfortune to be mis- 
judged and misunderstood. 

One of the saddest facts about the whole 
subject is that the victim is usually uncon- 
scious of the tricks, and goes on year after 
year misjudging himself as much as the 
world misjudges him, but in a different way. 

Each man's tricks are peculiar to himself, 
and, at first thought, no one could possibly 
tell, if he should try his best, how his par- 
ticular mannerism began, or why it continues 
without change. The fact is that in most 
instances it began in childhood or youth, and 
has continued in the way it began by virtue 
of the physiological law that the nerve cen- 
ters tend to reproduce an act once done 
rather than to do another and different one. 
By this law all the habits, all the automa- 
tisms of our daily existence are built up, even 
our education. Once set agoing, the trick 
is repeated again and again, and soon be- 
comes as automatic as walking is ; and so it 
continues, perhaps to the end of life, with the 
victim often in serene ignorance of the fact. 
69 



BASHFULNESS 

If every person could suddenly have 
revealed to him all his habits and manner- 
isms that have originated and continued in 
the necessities, real and imaginary, of his 
own bashfulness, there would probably be 
the largest company of surprised and dis- 
gusted people since the beginning of the 
world. 

In the main there is no way of making 
people see these vices, for they are not 
normally inclined to see them, and frank 
friends who will tell them are few. Our 
friends have courage to tell us of our sins, 
and we take it not unkindly; but they are 
reluctant about telling us of our foibles, lest 
our vanities may be touched and we be 
angry. 

If we could only so learn the art of intro- 
spection as to study ourselves impersonally, 
most of us would discern a few mannerisms 
growing out of bashfulness, the correction 
of which would make us changed beings to 
the community. The novels of Mr. Howells 
have done a vast amount of good to his read- 
ers by uncovering and bringing into strong 
relief the numerous foibles of our poor 
nature, and so helping us to a profitable self- 
examination, but I do not recall that he, or 
any other author, has ever dealt with those 
70 



BASHFULNESS 

which come out of the emotion of bashful- 
ness. No foibles of the race are more pro- 
nounced than these, and the list of them is 
large. Only a few of them can be described 
here. 

One of the most disagreeable vices of 
mannerism is the habit of interjecting into 
one's conversation little explosions of 
laughter quite without meaning and usually 
without the smallest occasion for mirth. In 
the main it is very silly. It is a common 
habit ; a man will laugh with every sentence 
or every third sentence whether grave or 
gay ; even death itself gets its giggle, and he 
may scold if it is a gentle scolding, and may 
tell of his gravest misfortune in the same 
manner. Only when he is in deep anger or 
great fear does he drop this habit. He will 
describe a slaughter, read a sentence of 
death, and condole with mourners with the 
aid of his own little laugh, and he doesn't 
know it, or if he knows it, he is incapable 
usually of seeing how it looks to others. 
The habit always starts in bashfulness, and 
has no other genesis whatever. But it gives 
the critics the ground for unfavorable com- 
ment which they never neglect ; they never 
exercise a charitable judgment, but, with 
the inexorableness of fate, they give the indi- 

71 



BASHFULNESS 

vidual a character and estimate colored about 
as badly as possible by the fact of this man- 
nerism. 

Another habit founded in the same mis- 
fortune is that of making jests or jokes out 
of nearly everything. Horse-play is con- 
stant; extravagances of speech, hyperbole, 
figures of speech and quotations are a large 
part of the conversation. Some of these 
victims come finally to be quite unable, out- 
side of their constant 'associates, to speak 
simply and in their own language about any- 
thing, and the world regards them as insin- 
cere, hilarious or trifling, when they are 
only following an automatism in manner 
that started in bashfulness. This habit 
begins later in life than that of automatic 
laughter, but it is quite as disagreeable to 
others, and more damaging to a man's repu- 
tation. 

A much worse habit is that of bravado and 
pompousness in talk and action, a habit early 
acquired and shown especially in boys reared 
under a certain regime. I have never known 
this fault more common among boys than in 
rural New England. As long as a boy can 
keep up his air of pomposity, he can avoid 
breaking down in embarrassment, and this 
becomes his refuge in his bashfulness ; and 
72 



BASHFULNESS 

once started he never gets over the habit, 
and so the mark is fixed upon the man by 
this juvenile blemish. 

The habit of sternness is only a variation ; 
a man grows into ways of severity, that in 
his soul he does not mean, and wife, chil- 
dren, everybody, feel it, and the tender- 
hearted man is never discovered; nobody 
ever knows him. His early bashfulness has 
buried his true self out of sight. The man 
is chained to the inexorable; if he should 
relax his severity he might some day shed 
tears, and that would be soft and womanish 
and a disgrace to him. Many women have 
this habit as fixed as men have. They will 
kiss their babies, but never their children, 
and never a word of endearment or affection 
must be used — that would be childish and 
silly. The poet's old man parting with 
his son on his going to the war could only 
say: "Good-bye, Jim, take care of yourself." 
That was all he could say ; it exhausted his 
vocabulary of affection, and it revealed a 
poverty that is always pathetic. 

A curious type produced by self -conscious- 
ness and diffidence is one of people afraid 
of controversy, and morally too feeble or 
too lazy to dispute or disagree. To such 
people even the gentlest controversy has a 

73 



BASHFULNESS 

look of unfriendliness and severity, and is a 
hint of battle. You meet such a one on 
the street, and he will carry the amenities 
of the weather into every avenue of conver- 
sation you can engage him in. If it is rain- 
ing he will say it is a rainy day ; if fair, that 
it is fair, and if foggy, then foggy — there can 
be no controversy about the weather. But 
talk of a dozen other subjects and he will 
agree with you as to all of them, or, if he 
does not agree, he will say he doesn't know; 
that is a bulwark behind which he can 
retreat, and may at any moment. These 
people spend their whole lives agreeing with 
others, both those who may happen to be 
"in the way with" them, and those whom 
they meet casually. They are negative char- 
acters, and count in the world very much like 
so many ciphers, for they have no opinions 
on anything but the commonest subjects, no 
opinions that require to be defended. The 
world counts them as nonentities, and yet it 
is unfair, for many of them have views that 
would do anybody credit, and many succeed 
in filling useful places in society. Their 
lack of self-assertion is not the result of 
ordinary cowardice, but of that form only 
that is the product of bashfulness or diffi- 
dence, and they are hopelessly handicapped 

74 



BASHFULNESS 

by it; with the graver things of life they 
often have courage enough. 

Some men are so bashful about contro- 
versies that they are at times unable to be 
strictly truthful when truth-telling might 
lead to a dispute. Some veer so far from 
the possibility of a controversy that they 
shrink from showing any displeasure unless 
they are positively angry ; then the diffidence 
is gone by displacement. They seem pleased 
when displeased, and scare you when, out of 
smiles and suavity, they explode in anger 
without apparent reason. When a boy at 
school I was once the sole boarder of a lady 
who habitually met people with smiles and 
serenity that seemed without reserve or 
alloy. She interlarded her conversation with 
little, gentle laughter that I then thought 
due to her exceeding sweetness of disposi- 
tion. Now it is plain that it was an auto- 
matic mannerism to cover her diffidence; 
then it was a warrant that she could never 
be cross, and as it had been constant for 
weeks, it gave me a sense of great satisfac- 
tion and security. An explosion of dynamite 
could not have surprised me more than when 
she gave me an angry scolding one evening 
for being late to supper — she said I had been 
late repeatedly, which was probably true, 

75 



BASHFULNESS 

although that was the first intimation that 
had come to my dull mind of the fact or that 
I might incommode her. The cause of her 
displeasure ceased at once, and she resumed 
her manner of artificial smiles and laughter 
which had the same sound and look as 
before, but I could never get over a sus- 
picion of her — I had been startled, and could 
not again feel sure of understanding her. 
She was a good woman, and a perfect ex- 
ample of a large class of people who are for- 
ever miscalculated because of manners that 
depend on the cowardice of diffidence and 
that make them always a little insincere in 
their demeanor toward others. Probably 
their sort of insincerity is better than an 
opposite kind ; it is not wholly bad since it 
often deceives us into a belief that there are 
more sweet-tempered people in the world 
than actually exist, but it leads to awkward 
and very humiliating surprises and to many 
a disillusionment. 

But a more unfortunate and numerous 
type is that of people bashful about their 
ignorance. They have some weird sensitive- 
ness that makes them blush at the exposure 
of any defect in their mental equipment, and 
so they hedge in conversation, and refrain 
from asking questions or expressing opin- 

76 



BASHFULNESS 

ions that they think likely to reveal it. 
Of course they do reveal it on every hand 
and in the most blind unconsciousness — 
and their blushes are spared by this latter 
fact. This foolishness is an attribute of 
immaturity and nervousness, and people 
grow out of it as they broaden ; the greater 
the man the less he shows this quality. 
Your truly superior man is frankness itself; 
he will come to a new town or situation, or 
among a new set of people, full of a new 
subject, and will ask a hundred questions, 
and reveal his ignorance as simply as a 
child would. A narrow man, afraid his 
limitations may become known, will listen 
and keep shut like a clam; most likely his 
ignorance will be revealed inadvertently ; if 
not, he will be set down as simply taciturn 
and unresponsive. 

I would not by any means condemn the 
practice of silence in ignorance, for it helps 
many a one out of hard dilemmas, and is often 
commendable ; it is only unfortunate when it 
handicaps a man and makes him to appear 
smaller than he really is, besides making him 
a coward ; and when it is invoked not to fur- 
ther the serious, laudable purposes of life, 
but to cover the weakness of diffidence. 

I know that the claim will be challenged 

77 



BASHFULNESS 

that bashfulness is more common in the male 
than in the female part of the community, 
but the proof is ample. The excrescences 
resulting from it are fully twice as common 
in men as in women, and a most mortifying 
one, not before referred to, is found almost 
solely in boys and men, namely, that of stut- 
tering and stammering. How many stam- 
mering girls or women can you count? It is 
a thing almost unheard of. And why does 
it occur almost exclusively among boys? 
Self-consciousness is the only explanation; 
when the stuttering boys are alone, they 
speak perfectly — in company they never do. 

While bashfulness is a misfortune, and 
produces untold grief, it is not wholly mis- 
chievous, for it both speaks for and develops 
gentler natures than otherwise we might 
have, and therefore has a ministry for good. 
Boldness is less likely to go with bashfulness, 
and boldness is offensive; but occasionally 
it is affected to parry the sensation of bash- 
fulness, and then it is doubly offensive. 
Diffidence in some people draws others 
toward them to be gentle to them, and gentle 
by reason of this restraining quality. 

After we have analyzed bashfulness and 
discovered its results, what ought we to do 
with it? Should we abolish it if we could? 

78 



BASHFULNESS 

That is impossible anyway, for it is inborn and 
inherent in the lives of men, as completely 
so as a belief in a hereafter ; nor should we 
try to abolish it out of human nature, for 
that would be a distinct loss to the race. 

The supreme thing for us to do is to 
acknowledge it freely as something that is as 
unavoidable as the color of the skin, and not 
attempt to mask it or cover it up, or resort 
to any tricks to make ourselves feel that it 
does not exist. 

Nobody thinks less of a man because he is 
bashful ; he suffers no disesteem from others 
on account of it; then why should he dis- 
esteem himself? Probably the bashful man, 
if he is free from offensive mannerisms 
about it, that is, if he acts bashful without 
tricks to hide it, is admired and cultivated by 
more desirable people for this very reason. 
What a blessed relief from his troubles if he 
could stop hating himself because of this 
besetment and could agree that he would act 
sincerely and simply, and without devices to 
conceal it ! 

It is always laudable to act better than we 
are ; it is a harmless deception upon others. 
The reflex effect of this course upon our- 
selves is sometimes, let us hope, to lead us 
to become better in heart, and so there is a 

79 



BASHFULNESS 

real gain. But it is always unprofitable to 
deceive ourselves by tricks to hide our real 
sensations, or otherwise. And we can act 
better than ourselves in no other way so well 
as by behaving with simplicity and genuine- 
ness. 

But alas, long before a man is able to 
reason about his mannerisms and the harm 
they may work to his character and career, 
he is usually past help in the thralldom of 
these very habits ; they have begun in child- 
hood, and he fails to see them, or if he does 
discover exactly how he looks and acts to 
others, he finds that it requires a long and 
patient self -watchfulness, a constant intro- 
spection, extending through months or years, 
before he can hope to eradicate wholly the 
blemishes that have been fixed by perhaps 
decades of automatic nervous and mental 
action. 

One of the best remedies for bashfulness 
is to think more of others and less of self. 
As a man grows unselfish and imbued with 
his duty to others his bashfulness decreases. 
As we get over our egotism, our everlasting 
thinking about ourselves and what we are to 
do toward others and how we are to appear 
to them, and what others are likely to say 
and do for us and in relation to us — our per- 
80 



BASHFULNESS 

sonal selves, our vanity — the less our minds 
will be concerned with this remarkable 
emotional sensation. 

Exactly as we enlarge in the breadth and 
extent of our conscious, unselfish duties 
toward others — duties that are linked to no 
hope of reward or applause — does our supe- 
riority to self-consciousness grow. 

One of the most unprofitable of all mental 
occupations, if pursued far or long, is the 
meditation on the debts of attention others 
owe to us, commendation that we deserve — 
as well as our debts in the contrary direc- 
tion. These deferential bills payable and 
receivable cause almost as much grief and 
trouble as their monetary homologues. 

So, if we cannot put diffidence out of our 
natures entirely and ought not to, we may 
both lessen our annoyance at it and at the 
same time g^row better in soul and heart by 
reducing our conceits, or, in other words, 
our selfishness, and by increasing our altru- 
ism. ' 

The outlook for much improvement to 
many people growing out of a study by them- 
selves of this subject is far from flattering. 
Of those who consider it only a few will ever 
study introspectively ; fewer will discover 
their own unnaturalness of manner that has 
8i 



BASHFULNESS 

grown up from an emotional basis (we easily 
discover the blemishes in others), and a 
select few will ever succeed in this way in 
permanently correcting the faults. 

Better success may be had with children in 
the formative period of the tricks. They 
may be taught, if their parents will, to avoid 
disagreeable habits, to act and be them- 
selves, and that bashfulness is neither to be 
shunned nor to be ashamed of. If this last 
truth could be taught effectively to all chil- 
dren, it would prove a most useful step, for 
then the temptation to take on mannerisms 
would be greatly reduced. But for average 
diffident children this would not be suffi- 
cient; the impulse to acquire the tricks is 
too spontaneous, and there is only one 
sovereign remedy for such, and that is for 
their close friends and parents — and chiefly 
their mothers — to study them carefully and 
by pointing out their mannerisms, and show- 
ing their inevitable effect if they continue, to 
help them to shun or correct them. In order 
to accomplish this end, it is usually indis- 
pensable to keep the confidence and coopera- 
tion of the child absolutely. He must know 
that you have his interest wholly and only at 
heart, or you will not succeed best. You 
may attain partial success by shaming a 

82 



BASHFULNESS 

child out of such habits; never the best suc- 
cess. 

For a large class of children the service 
contemplated would be more useful in their 
after lives than a fortune or a college educa- 
tion. One of the greatest difficulties in our 
dealings with a child is over the emotions of 
egotism and selfishness. These qualities are 
to a large degree synonymous ; they belong 
to most children, and particularly to the 
forceful ones who are destined to control the 
affairs of the world ; belong to them as to the 
beasts and birds. These qualities, especially 
the selfishness phase, are a great grief to 
their parents, to their mothers most, for it 
means heedlessness of their mothers' rights 
and claims, and so heart-crushings and dis- 
appointments. But they cannot be eradi- 
cated, nor should we wish them so. If we 
can temper them to a wholesome limit for 
the general good of the individual, and at the 
same time reduce his own chagrin at his 
bashfulness, we should regard the result as a 
great victory. 



83 



The Nerves of the Modern 
Child 



The Nerves of the Modern 
Child 



Man's place in the world is determined by 
the type and development of his nervous 
system. His brain and spinal cord fix his 
character and force. Defects of other 
organs, as heart, lungs, kidneys, and spleen, 
may destroy his life. But defect or weak- 
ness of brain and cord, while perhaps 
allowing him to live long, hamper him per- 
petually. 

The conservation of his nervous system 
must be, from birth to death, of paramount 
importance. Next to the forces that make 
for the general bodily strength and resisting 
power, those that influence the development 
and habits of the nervous system are most of 
all powerful in shaping the career of the indi- 
vidual. To a large degree it is true of no 
other set of organs but the nervous system 

87 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

that influences and impressions of very early 
life determine the final result. 

Every child has the natural right to the 
most successful and complete career in life 
that is possible to it. Any rational sacrifice 
or discipline in early years is justifiable and 
desirable, if it will perfect and round out the 
life and character as a whole, and give the 
individual the best chance in the race for 
success, and the greatest final aggregate of 
happiness. Fathers and mothers doubtless 
always try to train their children by the best 
light they have and so as to create the great- 
est probability of their ultimate success in 
life. There can be no impeachment of the 
good intentions toward their children of the 
great world of parents. But taken together 
they have numerous standards and systems 
of bringing up and educating children for 
their best good. In their tendencies and 
results many of the systems are directly 
opposed to each other, and history has wit- 
nessed several successive changes among the 
same people. Old ways have been discarded 
for new ones, always on the theory that the 
new are better. Changes have sometimes 
been made in accordance with altered notions 
of the highest purpose of a child's life, but 
not often. 

88 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

There is a general consensus that most 
children will have to earn their bread 
directly or indirectly, to live in civilized if 
not enlightened society, and that it is desir- 
able they should have comfortable if not 
happy lives of peace and amity. The inexor- 
able struggle for existence is never lost sight 
of by any one undertaking seriously and in 
a large way the care and education of chil- 
dren. A conspicuous few, however, and 
those most able to do the very best for their 
children, appear to think, if their manage- 
ment is an index of their thoughts, that a 
child should become solely an ornamental 
part of society. The multifarious changes 
in methods of education and care of the 
young in the past indicate the difficulties of 
the subject, and suggest that the last word 
has by no means yet been said. 

A study of the physical life of the people 
shows that in some way a better word is 
sorely needed. EfiEorts to correct evils some- 
times create others in different directions. 
Current conditions point to something 
wrong ; some tendency must be bad. 

Insanity and various other nervous dis- 
orders that more or less disable their victims, 
are alarmingly prevalent and probably on 
the increase among the people. 
89 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

Why this tendency? There must be some 
cause for it; it does not exist by chance. 
And the cause must somehow spend itself 
on the nervous system. Is a nervous de- 
generacy of the race imminent or upon us? 
If so, then the basis of it will be found in 
some habit of life or in the development of 
the people, some influence which is con- 
tinued probably through successive genera- 
tions of individuals. 

Nature is a great bookkeeper. It is true 
of every cell and fibre of the nervous system, 
as it is in the philosophy of life, that you 
cannot both have your cake and eat it. 
Brain cells and all cells are limited in their 
capacity for function by their inherent and 
congenital potentiality, differing in indi- 
viduals, always dependent for their best on 
good pabulum of blood, freedom from effete 
matter, and on time for recuperation after 
function. 

Long periods of nervous and mental strain 
can be compensated for only by longer rest; 
this is unavoidable if a genuine restoration 
of power is to be accomplished; and such 
restoration is usually possible if the labor 
and strain have been moderate. But really 
excessive depletion of the nervous system as 
a result of labor, worry, passion, indulgence 
90 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

or sickness of any sort usually ends in re- 
duced power that is to some extent per- 
manent. Only partial restoration is possible 
even by prolonged abstinence and rest. It 
is doubtful that any truly exaggerated strain 
of any organ of the body, any set or system 
of cells, is ever entirely recovered from. 
For cells produce their successors as one 
by one they break down and die ; and the 
progeny of severely debilitated cells — cells 
potentially debilitated by excessive labor — 
can hardly be expected to reach the highest 
or even the original standard. 

Infantile insomnia lasting a year or two is 
sometimes followed by some years of over- 
sleeping, after which the normal conditions 
and habits are restored. There is an army 
of broken-down men of business and women 
of society who must absent themselves from 
friends and business for months or years at a 
time for rest and the recuperation that comes 
of changed conditions of existence. And 
then the recovery is never up to the full 
standard of normal resisting power ; the vic- 
tim is left at best always a little below par. 

It is very evident that sections of the human 
race, and not a few of those most potential 
in the affairs of the world, are becoming 
congenitally weaker in their nerve cells, or 

91 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

that to them at least modern life is becoming 
more severe in its wearing effects on this part 
of the organism. Either the power of endur- 
ance is lessening, or the load is increasing in 
weight. As a result various nervous affec- 
tions and weaknesses abound and are prob- 
ably increasing. Among these, and short of 
insanity, are ; (a) Nervous and mental weak- 
ness shown on slight exertion, so-called 
"nervous prostration"; great nervousness 
on exertion of any kind, and easy mental and 
nervous demoralization; (b) a tendency to 
pain, especially in the head; pain on the 
slightest over-work or severe mental atten- 
tion, or close work with the eyes ; persisting 
pain in the back — sometimes called crudely 
"spinal irritation"; and [c) manifold forms 
of psycho-neurosis such as spasms, neural- 
gias, amyosthenia or muscular weakness 
occurring in an erratic manner, and aberra- 
tions of sensation and sight. These forms 
are often interdependent, frequently co-exist 
and are interchangeable. They are all more 
or less dependent upon some instability or 
irregularity in sensation, emotion or will- 
power over muscular and other acts. They 
are sometimes called hysterical, but this is 
an inadequate designation. 

Is there any nexus between this class of 
92 



NERVES OF MODERN CFIILD 

disorders and symptoms, and any of the 
prevalent habits of the people? I think 
there is. 

First of all, to a large class of people the 
nervous strain of life in America is greater 
than formerly, and so the jpotentiality of 
brain cells is worn ont faster; the load is 
heavier. Then the unwholesomeness of the 
lives of many infants and children, on their 
nervous side, reduces the capacity of their 
brains to bear worry in their maturity, and 
so the power is reduced. Nothing illus- 
trates this last proposition better than the 
growth of the emotional or so-called hyster- 
ical habit, as nothing shows better than that 
how easy it is for injury to be done to the 
mental and emotional nature. 

The hysterical tendency grows by what it 
feeds upon. Emotional excitement, the 
shortest step beyond the wholesome limit, is 
always liable, if not certain, to beget lack of 
emotional stability; then excessive mobility 
of nervous force in the emotional direction 
may occur, and frequent and ready explo- 
sions. Personal attention received, compli- 
ments, praise, may produce it to a moderate 
degree; but yearning expectation of per- 
sonal attention causes it to a much greater 
degree, and more than anything else. 

93 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

Indeed, expectation of the attentions of 
others, of their consideration, compliments 
and applause; the fear these may not be 
received; grief, chagrin and jealousy at 
their not coming, or because they are not of 
the right kind or degree, or just to the lik- 
ing of the recipient, more than all other 
causes, tend to develop the hysterical consti- 
tution, and to wear out the nervous and 
mental resources. 

That mental worry and not work wears us 
out is an old, true doctrine. But worry is 
an emotion entirely, and for many people 
the whole secret of happiness is to minify 
or abolish this emotion. The history of 
medicine is full of examples of queer mind 
disease produced by the carking emotions of 
over desire for attention, and of jealousy. 
Dr. Weir Mitchell has described them and 
their treatment With these people, to a 
singularly morbid condition of mind, is 
added by slow development the most amaz- 
ing system of tricks and deception to in- 
duce sympathy. No one does these things 
in any such degree at first; but like any 
other vice, this is a matter of growth, and 
the growth finally attained is appalling. 
A patient refuses to eat, and is the won- 
der of the neighborhood — she eats surrep- 

94 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

titiously. One is completely bedridden, 
and cannot eat without vomiting — she 
does sometimes actually vomit — but her 
nurse is pledged to keep secret the fact that 
she walks about at night and eats freely and 
retains her food. One woman, a supposed 
wreck of nerves, keeps up her high fever for 
weeks by sending the nurse out of the room 
for some trifle whenever her temperature is 
being taken, and then herself shaking the 
mercury upward in the thermometer. There 
is no manner of deception short of crime, if 
crime even has been the limit, that such 
patients have not perpetrated at the behest 
of their insatiable craving for attention and 
sympathy and wonder. 

These morbid states grow out of the 
normal love of the companionship and fel- 
lowship of mankind; they are only normal 
emotion run wild and unchecked. Imagina- 
tion and love of companionship belong to 
every child ; we cannot stop nor curb them 
much, nor should we care to; it is the 
morbidity that kills, and the habit of exag- 
geration, and emotional, even hysterical, 
exaltation is a thing that comes to children, 
in a smaller way, as truly as to men. No 
observing physician, who has treated many 
nervous children, has failed to note how 

95 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

quickly some of these develop, or discover 
that they have, almost any symptom that is 
inquired about in their hearing; how they 
often complain of pains and other morbid 
phenomena, wholly as a result of suggestion 
or mimetism. Such patients are numerous 
enough, but only a few have the symptoms 
to the phenomenal degree indicated above. 
And the treatment found most successful for 
such cases is a revelation in its effects as to the 
cause and nature of this class of disorders. 

The treatment consists in taking away all 
the incentives to the deception by stopping 
absolutely all gratification of the morbid 
emotions. For many days no one who could 
possibly express sympathy or pity or wonder 
is allowed to speak to the patient; at the 
same time he is fed, cared for^ and groomed 
faithfully and tenderly. The treatment is 
usually successful. The fuel is cut off, and 
the flame dies. The rest of body and nerves 
and the utter change from previous habits 
help the recuperative power of the system to 
bring about a recovery, partial or complete. 

For the neuralgias, nervous prostration, 
and the inability for connected thought, the 
doctors advise perfect rest, and freedom 
from care and worry. The treatment con- 
sists, essentially, in freeing the mind from 
96 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

every influence that has caused the trouble, 
and putting it and the body in a wholesome 
state of good hygiene. If the recuperation 
can be complete, and the causative influ- 
ences can be avoided, the brain does not fall 
again into the same condition. The 
prophylaxis is to avoid the cause. 

But how does child or adult begin to fall 
into these bad ways? What is the sequence? 
It is easy enough. One of the very first 
experiences in the life of a child is of caress- 
ings and other proofs of affection. These 
are precious to the groping susceptibilities of 
the new being, as they are precious through 
life. And perhaps before the end of the 
first week after birth the child has, if it is 
bom to parents of the nervous temperament, 
learned to demand these attentions. Before 
long it must be sung to, or walked with, to 
court sleep, and soon will not fall asleep dis- 
appointed, and till it gets the sweet pabulum 
of lulling affection it is disappointed. It 
finds in its mother's heart as strong a desire 
to give as it has to have, and so the habit 
grows and the child is carried on into years, 
led, followed, obeyed, played with, enter- 
tained, and not a minute to itself for its poor 
brain cells to run in spontaneous action. 

So he becomes an autocrat in the home ; 

97 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

he demands everything, and if he does not 
get everything he wants, he gets some sup- 
posedly good thing in its place, and he 
certainly receives constant attention and 
makes incalculable work for everyone about 
him. He must be perpetually amused; if 
he cries he is perhaps fed, and often anything 
but good food ; he must be talked to, carried 
about ; drums and music are invoked — any- 
thing to satisfy him or stop his crying. He 
cannot sleep unless he is carried in the arms, 
perhaps for hours, or rocked or sung to; 
then if the lulling stops he is awake again 
to demand the same process repeated. And 
he is withal a very poor sleeper. Verily, 
his nervous system has grown by what it 
has fed upon, and he has early become a 
hyperesthetic nervous invalid, with no 
stability in normal ways, but herculean per- 
sistency in abnormal ones. 

We have changed in recent years our 
methods of dealing with children. Formerly 
they were taught not only obedience, but to 
be seen and not heard, and seen without 
ostentation ; now we rush the most promising 
of them forward, and lead them to feel, what 
is largely true, that the world is theirs ; and 
it is a question whether we have gained by 
the change. 

98 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

Many successful men and women look 
back with regret on the severe lines of their 
own childhood, and thank Heaven that their 
children's lot is cast in gentler ones — but 
the children are less vigorous than their par- 
ents were, they have more pain and discom- 
fort, and neurasthenia, and can accomplish 
less in the arithmetic of the world. More- 
over, they have proportionately fewer 
children than their parents had, and the 
latter had fewer than the grandparents. 
Thus the so-called higher civilization and 
development, and more indulgence of chil- 
dren, not in what they want and need, but 
in what on the moment they wish for, are 
constantly deteriorating the race, or a sup- 
posedly favored part of it, while they 
accentuate its refinements of taste, and 
increase its avidity for pleasure. They 
cause such effect of exhaustion of the nerv- 
ous system of the individual that a single 
generation is sufficient to show the reduced 
resistance to the effects of the unavoidable 
environment on brain and nerves. 

A great lesson that philosophers of all 
times have taught is the folly of mortgaging 
the future for the present, of yielding to the 
desire for a momentary, intense, present 
pleasure at the expense of the comfort of the 

99 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

long future. It has been through the ages 
notorious that adults are in danger of doing 
this, and Goethe told in Faust only the 
story that was as old as the thought of the 
race ; this character was merely an example 
of a class of intense men and women of all 
times, ready to promise their future to the 
devil or anybody or anything, if their 
insistent gratification be secured now. The 
close of this century has witnessed the exten- 
sion of this sort of sin against mankind to a 
large number of children, and with both the 
connivance and assistance of their parents. 
Instead of allowing the child what it 
desires, if it comports with some rights of 
others and is not bad for its own develop- 
ment, it is too often allowed everything it 
likes, unless it can be seen to be instantly 
very harmful. The greater the companion- 
ship and comradery parents have with their 
children, the more easily they conclude the 
children should have the same indulgence of 
pleasures as the grown people. Is it any 
wonder that the children should, many of 
them, with such latitude, increase their 
intellectual and nervous speed, and wear out 
their cerebral dynamos? The wonder is, 
rather, that we who pretend to think should 
wonder at it. 

lOO 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

What and where is the remedy? 

The remedy is several sided, but in prin- 
ciple it is simple. Its basis is candor and 
honesty to the child's whole life— the future 
as well as the present. It spurns the idea 
that the present, because it is on hand v»rith 
its demands, shall necessarily have sway 
over the interests of the future career which 
are not here to plead. 

The remedy falls naturally into several 
paragraphs. 

Give the child, if possible, good general 
physical health. To this end he must have 
much outdoor life, good ventilation of his 
rooms, wholesome food in abundance, which 
he must eat as deliberately as possible. He 
should never have any stimulant or narcotic 
of any sort or amount unless actually pre- 
scribed for sickness. This refers to tea, 
coffee, tobacco, and alcohol. Relieve him of 
every local irritation or chronic inflamma- 
tion of any part of his body; for such are 
sure, in a reflex way, to harm the nervous 
system, to his unspeakable and life-long 
injury. 

This good body and brain health can be 
attained only by long hours of sleep. A 
child should always go to bed early, nolens 
volens, and it should then have its sound 

lOI 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

sleep out without being awakened. Other 
things equal, probably not another rule of 
childhood is so useful as that which insists 
on the largest measure of sleep possible. 

For his brain's future, his life spirit, be 
honest with him. Give him every good and 
pleasure that will aid his development and 
strength for the race of life ; these will give 
him a childhood happy enough, and always 
blessed to look back upon. Withhold the 
bad things, even forcefully. It is safe to be 
as candid and honest with a child as you are 
with a man. The mystery and uncandor of 
most parents on the subject of the physical 
lives of their children do more harm than the 
most unlimited frankness. 

If the basis here indicated is to be 
attained, certain definite things in the lives 
of many children must be omitted or 
changed. We must as far as possible com- 
pel a tranquil nervous and intellectual life. 
Every indulgence that will minister solely or 
greatly to nervous excitement and emotional 
exaltation must be refused. Stop walking 
with the baby and rocking him to sleep. 
Attend to his normal wants, especially as to 
food and temperature, then put him in his 
bed and leave him alone. The instant he 
finds this rule inexorable he will acquiesce, 

I02 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

to his benefit and delight ; he will have more 
and better sleep and gain in nervous strength 
amazingly. 

Never "show off" a child. The trotting 
of him out in public to speak or play or do 
"smart things' ' usually panders to his vanity, 
if not that of his parents, and develops a 
baneful love of attention and applause. 
There is no good in it for any child ; least of 
all is it beneficial to the bashful one. 

Never boast of the exploits of a child in 
his presence, for it encourages his pride, and 
pride is a vicious emotion in children, as it is 
in adults. Pride is not the same quality as 
self-respect, which is always good. 

Avoid any indulgence that increases the 
sense of personal embarrassment of a child, 
but teach him, if possible, that bashfulness 
is not a sin, nor a thing to be made fun of, 
nor to be ashamed of. 

Don't repeatedly nag the child to preserve 
the clothes he wears, or about his general 
neatness, or even as to many good manners 
that he will take on instinctively at his 
adolescence. We don't try to make infants 
behave like ladies and gentlemen ; then why 
should we little children, or even big chil- 
dren, at the expense of their regard for us 
and the good influence we have over them? 
103 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

For a nervous child reduce the emotional 
excitement of every sort to a minimum ; and 
for the excitement of play and bustle with 
other children, which prevents eating or 
sleeping well, ordain certain hours each day 
to be spent alone or with an unemotional per- 
son who will refrain from entertaining him. 
He thus will find he can amuse himself, and 
this resource for such a nature will bring rest. 
A child reduced in weight by lowered nutri- 
tion; with poor digestion, made worse by 
bolting the little food he eats, but who plays 
furiously and to exhaustion throughout his 
school noontime ; who has so-called growing 
pains at night that nearly always speak for 
embarrassed intestinal digestion, and who 
sleeps badly, and with dreams and night- 
mare, may often be brought to himself and 
made a new creature by being compelled to 
stay in the house unentertained at least one 
hour in the middle of the day, and to go to 
bed early. Left to the expedients of his 
own ingenuity for a time each day, he finds 
he has an appetite, and he soon has better 
digestion and sleeps sweetly, and grows in 
weight and strength and tranquillity. Prob- 
ably there is no method of correction of a 
disobedient child so useful in all ways as to 
make him stop and go to bed in a room alone. 
104 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

He dislikes it, but the punishment is devoid 
of brutality, and the child thinks by him- 
self, actually meditates, and rests and 
sleeps. 

The course of things in which a child is 
constantly pandered to, amused, and kept 
occupied is unutterably vicious. It increases 
nervous irritability and the inborn selfish- 
ness that is great enough already. Let him 
learn to be something of and to himself, 
work out to some slight extent his own 
mental salvation, and find that it is possible 
for him to stop and think and do nothing 
else for a perceptible time. He may envy 
other children whom he sees having more 
things done for them, but he will some day 
look back on the time of his youth with a 
stronger brain than those other favored chil- 
dren will then have, and his totality of enjoy- 
ment through life will, if he has good sense, 
be greater than theirs. He will have fewer 
jealousies and hates, and more wholesome 
emotions. 

The brain of every child who is worth 
much is active enough in its own way, and 
quite sufficiently imaginative. We may well 
direct its activity into wholesome channels 
of education and equipment for its future, 
but we are not called upon, even in educat- 

105 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

ing it, to increase the normal activity of its 
brain cells and wear out the powers it ought 
to have for the more useful years of adult 
life, or to make for it a new world of fancy 
and imagination. The sweet memories of 
fairy tales are but a beggarly possession for 
a large class of sensitive children who always 
acquire, with the fairy tales, a belief in the 
reality of ghosts and hobgoblins, and are 
for years nightly terrified by thoughts of 
them. It is no reply to this contention to 
say that it is unfair to deprive the child of 
imagination ; nobody ever succeeded in doing 
that, nor is it desirable to do it. And fairy 
tales are not in themselves to be despised, 
and probably are a blessing to some children. 
But their mission at best is one of pleasure, 
not of development of power, and to some 
child-natures they are poison. Let a child 
build up his own imaginative world out of 
the actualities of his environment and of 
himself, and he will come to mature years 
with a more wholesome and promising mind 
for it. Many a boy left to himself in these 
matters has evolved so much of the philos- 
ophy of life that, when later he reads Plato 
and Socrates and Emerson, he seems to be 
repeatedly confronting the children of his 
own brain. 

1 06 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

Nor does this plea deserve the censure 
that it would deprive child-life of its pleas- 
ures. It looks far away from any such 
calamity. But there are pleasures and 
pleasures, and the circus and spectacular 
performance do not furnish the kind of 
enjoyment that is most wholesome or per- 
manently satisfying to a normal child. They 
soon begin to wear him out and give him 
troubled dreams and make him sick. No 
parent would think of sending a child into 
such excitement every day. Yet it is the 
fatuous sin of modern evolved and culti- 
vated society that it is doing its utmost to 
give its children the same character of excite- 
ment, only under color of a different name 
and in a lesser degree, and not far from six 
days every week, and then wondering that 
we have among us a growing army of worn- 
out children, neurasthenics and emotional 
invalids. 

Education should increase the power to 
accomplish and resist, never lessen it; and 
it is a pitiful thing that a child should break 
down nervously through the ordeal of being 
educated. Yet many a child does ; some are 
handicapped for life and some are killed by 
it. They are sent away from school with 
damaged eyes and wrecked nerves to rest 
107 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

for months, to drop back a class or a year, 
and then, on re-entering, to do perhaps very 
indifferent work. 

In the first place, education gained at such 
cost is substantially useless; in the second 
place, something is radically wrong in the 
process when such effects follow. The cur- 
rent process may for the many — the major- 
ity — ^be a good one ; but for the susceptible 
ones liable to break, it is altogether bad, 
since, in nearly every step in its progress, 
it lessens rather than increases their power 
in the world's work. A better method must 
be found; it is unfair that these children 
should go through life with no systematic 
education; it is wicked to let them be 
crushed in the getting of it. 

What kind of schooling in detail could 
take its place with better or the best results 
it might not be easy to say, although any one 
that will spare the health of the child is 
better than one that ruins it. But it is 
not difficult to point out how the school 
life as devised for the average person bears 
heavily on certain susceptible children ; and 
the problem is the same in the academy and 
the college. 

The trouble must be either in the course 
of study or in the manner of its pursuit. A 
io8 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

boy in the field, the woods, and on the sea 
may in four years learn of his fellows and 
those about him as many things, such as 
they are, as he would acquire at a college, 
and be more vigorous with each successive 
month. Ought the school to have so widely 
different an effect? The mental work, as 
distinguished from worry, is not responsible 
for the injury. Worry tires, but not mental 
work of a wholesome sort and degree. 
There must be some cause beside the pure 
ideation involved in the act of learning, for 
this act, when uncontaminated, is pleasant 
and restful. 

School life, as it seems necessary for 
most children to live it, begets some influ- 
ences that unquestionably do lower the 
vitality and predispose to weakness, sick- 
ness, and ruination. There are several such 
factors, and they bear most on sensitive chil- 
dren (and there are many such) who have 
only barely enough vigor to sustain them- 
selves under the best conditions. The more 
marked of these factors may be classified 
under mental worry, sedentary life, and too 
much housing. 

To all sensitive and emotional children the 
mental worry of school life is harder than 
the work. They worry lest they shall fail, 
109 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

or acquit themselves poorly, or fall behind 
some fellow. The very rivalry so whole- 
some to many is exhausting to them, for 
jealousy and envy are mixed up with it, and 
these emotions are the most depressing of 
all. Study in classes is without doubt stim- 
ulating to intellectual pursuits, and a great 
help to the majority of students ; but it is, 
to the minority, so unavoidably connected 
with the depressing influences of rivalry, 
fear, jealousy, envy and even hate, that its 
good is lost in its harm. 

Most school work is done indoors, and 
this lessens the surplusage of the resisting 
power of the system. The greatest vigor is 
only consistent with outdoor life, for the 
outdoor air is the best to breathe, and sun- 
light is good; the air of the school-room 
contains at least twice as much animal con- 
tamination, even with the best system of 
ventilation, as the outdoor atmosphere. 
The great remedy for broken-down bodies is 
to live practically out of doors day and 
night. 

A sedentary life for any child is bad. 
Regular and active exercise is necessary, and 
many school children wholly fail to have it. 
To study long with the body in a fixed posi- 
tion, which is done by an army of pupils 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

despite the efforts of their teachers, is always 
debilitating. Athletics are something of a 
remedy, and in a few schools are made to 
tell to the best advantage. But they are not 
a feature in the school life of a quarter of 
the children who most need them, and they 
are voluntarily pursued best and most by 
the strong and vigorous. The weakly ones 
usually shun the blood-stirring sports. 

For the strong and nervously tranquil 
there is perhaps small occasion to complain 
in general of the modern school system ; but 
for the less fortunate a new educational 
gospel must be preached, which is nothing 
less than a plea for schooling to be carried 
on in and through the vocations and avoca- 
tions of life by teachers who shall live with 
the pupils and be so practical and pleasing in 
their instruction that it shall be free from 
every quality that can wear out the nervous 
resisting power. The plan should be to 
make the child's life one of constant develop- 
ment both of body and mind, and under the 
most ideal hygiene. This should combine 
as both initial and necessary, rather than 
secondary, conditions the right amount of 
outdoor exercise, of work, chore and errand 
doing, as well as athletics; of quiet rest in 
the house, various mental diversions and 
III 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

relaxations, just enough solitude and com- 
pany to obtain the best results; as much 
reading and discussion of the things read as 
is consistent with the plan, and a large 
amount of sleep. Such a schedule would 
provide what might be called a constant 
vacation for the pupil ; the very conditions 
necessary to produce pleasurably the largest 
development of the bodily powers. This 
scheme might be prescribed for any weakly 
child to try and make sure that he shall belie 
his prospects and live to attain adult years 
with some show of a life equipment. 
Carried out more or less thoroughly, it would 
prevent — and it is the only kind of an educa- 
tional system that can With any certainty 
prevent — the lowering of the vitality of the 
nervous system in the process of education 
of the handicapped children. 

The educational goal is to make every 
step, every hour of this system (even the 
sleeping hour) in some manner tell towards 
the mental and physical development of the 
individual. The education would come 
unconsciously, like the learning of the 
games and child-fashions from playmates. 
The growth of the mind would be as free 
from any indication of shock or strain as are 
the wholesome activity and unfoldings of 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

the years of infancy and young cliildhood 
before the education is begun or thought of. 

Some book-tasks there would have to be, 
some lessons, but they would involve no 
more labor than the story-reading that is 
wisely permitted any child or young person. 
The chief growth would come through the 
intellectual development the teacher could 
make possible, even compel, through and by 
almost every move and act of the pupil and 
every hour of the day ; he would compel the 
child's environment, including the human 
part of it and its history, to teach him ; the 
pupil would acquire not a passive but an 
active, a vital and virile cerebral relationship 
with every element and thing about and 
within him ; these latter would instruct him 
and become a part of his intellectual life. 
They would creep into his mental living as 
the rocks and hills and trees do in an oft- 
repeated journey, and the process would be 
as poetic and sweet. This sort of acquisition 
comes easily, and is always pleasurable; it 
does not weary the nerves nor worry the 
soul. It shows the ground on which we 
stand as nothing else ever can ; and it is the 
best education, both for the joy of having 
and for the power that it imparts. 

Nor is this altogether a new idea or a bid 

"3 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

for a complete innovation, although per- 
haps no school now carries out exactly the 
scheme as here outlined. But the educa- 
tional world is moving toward it a little, as 
shown by the great increase in practical 
courses of instruction, in outdoor teaching, 
field work, and in the numerous forms of 
manual training that are finding their way 
into the schools of many countries. The 
movement is toward imparting a knowledge 
of things as well as of people, and doing 
this by as much direct contact with them as 
possible. That is what manual training is, 
and about all it is. 

It is hardly necessary to say that in the 
system proposed the teachers would have to 
be superior people, far above the ordinary, 
and altogether wholesome, pleasing to the 
young, and practical ; none of the bookworm 
doctrinaires, ignorant of the practical things 
of life, and misfits in the universe, would do 
at all. Let the right teacher be found and 
the problem is easy. And the right teacher 
lives and may be found. It may require 
some hunting, but it is possible. And it is 
possible for a boy to be educated, and highly 
so, by daily association with certain men in 
thought, work, rest, and play. Indeed, as 
to some men, it would be impossible for any 
114 



NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 

boy of fair intelligence and tractability to 
associate with them a year in these relations 
and not show it in the largest possible educa- 
tional growth. 



"5 



Some Lessons of Heredity 



Some Lessons of Heredity 



It is the truest economy to live and work 
along the lines of law. 

A world of energy has been expended to 
make a machine capable of moving itself 
perpetually, and the grief at failure has been 
correspondingly great. 

Many good people have had sore struggles 
over their beliefs in ethics and religion, 
which they might have been spared had they 
first sought the line between the knowable 
and the unknowable. 

The influences of heredity have been 
invoked to explain nearly everything in 
men's lives, sometimes to the discredit of 
the whole subject. But the influence has 
most undoubtedly some laws that are as 
inexorable as the stars, and a study of them 
from any standpoint must always be useful, 
and can never be harmful. 
119 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

Instinct is hereditary and congenital 
automatism in animal function, and of all 
animals man has the least of it. The 
human infant is not only the most helpless 
of all, but does fewest things with expert- 
ness because its parents have done them 
before; it has the fewest hereditary autom- 
atisms at birth. 

The completed being, the full-grown man 
or woman, is largely an automaton, does 
most of the daily acts in a more or less 
mechanical way, but these automatisms 
have to be acquired, and no animal of any 
sort has the fitness to strive successfully for 
its own existence until they are acquired. 
They constitute the education of man, and 
practically all there is of it. He is most 
learned and expert who has the largest series 
of orderly and useful mental and nervous 
automatisms. 

The bird builds nearly as perfect a nest the 
first time it tries as it ever does; it has an 
untaught faculty that is expert the instant 
it is required. The bees and the beavers 
illustrate this truth. 

The human young has but two intuitive 
faculties at birth — to cry, and to close its 
lips and retract its tongue. All the rest 
must be acquired by practice and trial, and 

I20 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

the growth goes on for a third of a century, 
so long is the youth and development of the 
man. 

But although much is left to be acquired, 
much is inherited. The transmission of the 
qualities of the parents to the children is 
nearly as certain and extensive as is the 
case with the lower animals, only it is less 
apparent at beginning. It crops out at 
every step in the development of the indi- 
vidual in manifold ways and methods and 
mannerisms. 

How completely the exterior physical con- 
formation is often transmitted everybody 
knows. Color of skin and hair, form of 
features, looks, size, gait, and the tone of the 
voice even, surprisingly resemble those of 
one or both of the parents. Sometimes the 
apparent resemblance is to one parent only, 
or to a grandparent most, or even a great- 
grandparent, whence we have the expressive 
word atavism. But the appearances are 
about three-quarters of them clearly the 
copies of those of the direct parents, one or 
the other chiefly, or the two in a blending 
of variable degrees. Not more than a 
quarter of them can be traced to previous 
ancestry over the heads of the parents. The 
cases of atavism are remembered because 

121 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

they are most striking, and so they seem 
more numerous than they really are. The 
moles on the skin of the one parent which is 
most resembled reappear in the child; and 
at about the same age they may some of 
them enlarge and take on the morbidity 
known as sarcoma, often a mortal disease. 
The parent has a nervous susceptibility 
whereby certain articles of food, in a reflex 
way, cause a sudden swelling of portions of 
the skin with itching : the common hives ; or, 
instead, a swelling of the tongue occurs; or 
the lining of the bronchial tubes, a condition 
producing what we call asthma. The child 
has most likely the same susceptibility, and 
so the same experiences at about the same 
time in his life. The victim of migraine or 
sick-headache can usually find some explana- 
tion, if not satisfaction, in the fact that his 
father or mother had it before him, and 
through the same decades of life. 

It is unquestionable that in every minute 
hidden fiber of the physical organism — in the 
brain especially — the resemblance to the 
parents is as marked as it is in the external 
surface. There is every reason to regard 
this as true, and nothing to the contrary, and 
the ways and the mental and emotional ten- 
dencies follow the same law as the shape of 

122 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

the tissues. Those who doubt this do so 
with poor show of reason, although certain 
facts would at first thought seem to give 
warrant for the doubt. The chief fact look- 
ing against the theory is that the mental or 
emotional trait that happens to be the 
strongest nearly always governs the indi- 
vidual and gives color to his character, so 
that a father and son may markedly resemble 
each other and yet appear to be very differ- 
ent because the uppermost governing motive 
in one does not govern the other. One cul- 
tivates religion and art, the other horses, 
cards and sports with all that these imply. 
The men seem very unlike, but the likeness 
is remarkable. One is by our measure very 
exemplary, and the other perhaps a great 
sinner, yet they put exactly the same powers 
into use in similar ways, only about subjects 
having very different if not opposite moral 
qualities and attributes. 

Two well-known women of Chicago have 
predicted that women and men will some 
day be superior to "physical laws, inherited 
tendencies and social conditions." That is 
to say that then the human body will not 
grow by the appropriation of food to the 
needs of the organism by chemical and vital 
forces ; the child will not resemble his par- 
123 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

ents because they are his parents, and he 
will grow up uninfluenced by the social 
atmosphere about him. It may be they are 
right, but for all practical purposes we may 
as well postulate that physical laws are not 
likely to change, and that human beings are 
born to resemble their parents to a certain 
degree in emotions, ways of thinking and 
acting, as well as in looks. What men come 
to believe is quite another matter from their 
ways and methods of thinking. If the father 
and the son hold widely different views on 
religion and politics it does not argue dis- 
similarity in methods and powers. 

It was long ago settled that the best bal- 
ance and the greatest vigor of the organism, 
whether of man or animals, come of some 
unlikeness of the parents. Too much 
similarity of them leads to a weakening of 
the race, and races run out from such causes. 
Thoroughbred animals are notoriously less 
tough and resisting than the common herd. 
They are all too much alike ; it is the ambi- 
tion that they shall be alike ; this insures in 
a high degree certain qualities supposed to 
be desirable, like high speed, or an easy 
riding-gait in a horse, but in resisting 
severe conditions the thoroughbred is always 
outdone by the mongrel. These truths 
124 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

obtain as to men as well as animals. The 
first step in the deterioration is the occur- 
rence of weakness in some organ or power, 
a weakness likely to be transmitted if the 
parents are similar, and in the struggle for 
existence only the strong and symmetrical, 
the well-balanced, thrive greatly and outlast 
their fellows — inherited weaknesses are fatal 
finally. 

Excessive development in a particular 
direction, the intellectual or emotional or the 
artistic, is likely to lead to a progeny less 
vigorous, and perhaps erratic and lacking 
symmetry. There is lack of symmetry 
because some quality is unusually developed, 
and also because some other one and per- 
haps a very necessary one is below the 
requisite standard. This lack of balance is 
probably unavoidable for more than one or 
two successive generations ; such is the law. 

Intellectual greatness rarely continues 
through more than two or three generations 
of a family, and gifted families run out, or, 
if not that, they run down for several gener- 
ations and till new blood from humbler, but 
for the weal of the race more promising, 
sources can enter them. 

The fact of heredity will not and cannot be 
gainsaid. The hereditary intellectual states 
125 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

and endowments cannot be denied, but the 
greatest intellects do not always, nor usually, 
come from the greatest but rather from fair 
or mediocre ones, of well-balanced people 
and well-mixed or varied parentage. Vigor 
of body and tranquillity and stability of nerv- 
ous system tell for most, and generations of 
wholesome, tranquil lives are a preparation 
for one or a few lives of surpassing capa- 
bilities. Students wonder why persons with 
great and phenomenal intellects usually are 
born to people of simple lives and tastes 
and meager attainments. They ought not to 
wonder, for the predecessors of the phenom- 
enons have generally had bodies and brains 
so firm and perfect and with such reserve 
of balanced power that their children might 
easily be capable of great things. We are 
surprised that the children of intellectual 
and spiritual greatness are not always great, 
but are occasionally degenerates, full of way- 
ward passions, and altogether devoid of that 
balance of character that tells in life and in 
society. We should not be surprised, for 
the step from a genius to a degenerate, an 
uneven, unbalanced person, is sometimes a 
short one, and very high intellectuality on 
the part of the parents often means an exces- 
sive mobility of brain-impulses that is in the 
126 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

long run a weakness in itself; it always, too, 
suggests an uncertainty as to the reliability 
of the other qualities of the organism, for no 
man can be great far beyond the average of 
his kind in one direction and be sure of 
sufficient strength and perfect balance in all 
the others. 

If the invariable transmission of exces- 
sively developed qualities were possible, it 
would mean the doom of the race, for the in- 
dividuals would many of them become so 
asymmetrical that they would go to the wall 
in the face of the adverse conditions of their 
environment. Like begets like, but under 
wholesome conditions, not to the extent of 
perpetuating for long unbalanced specimens 
even in what we choose to call a good direc- 
tion. Then, similar things can by a trifling 
variation come to appear quite unlike. For 
example, the child of very wise and intel- 
lectual people of the. highest credit is smart, 
bright enough, but lacks application, and 
has so much appetite, or so little self-control, 
that he habitually swallows in undue pro- 
portion the substances commonly regarded 
as fit for the human body, and by this little 
variation he becomes a vagabond. The 
fault with the heredity is not that the intel- 
lectual traits were not transmitted, but that 
127 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

in the inevitable slight variations resulting 
from that process, it has happened that the 
work-day has become two instead of ten 
hours, and that the alcohol taken is twenty 
instead of one per cent of the water, and so 
the moral sense of society is outraged. If 
only tobacco had taken the place of alcohol, 
society wouldn't complain so much of the 
heredity, for then the moral sense of the 
community would not be shocked. Or if the 
mental quality of industry had been just a 
little greater, as the parents had it, and if 
the self-control against the appetite for 
stimulants common to the race, had been as 
great as the parents had it, there would have 
been no trouble. 

Really, the transmitted traits that count 
most, that we most prize, that most de- 
termine the place of the individual in the 
world, are the emotional ones. An emo- 
tional balance means self-control and a 
proper place in society ; it means that man- 
ner of action that we call character or moral 
conduct, by which the world measures every 
man. The world does not care half so much 
about the real intellectual capacity of men 
as it does for the qualities that make for 
conduct. 

Can these traits be developed where they 
128 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

do not exist? The philanthropic soul of the 
world says they can, and sometimes they 
seem to be. Certainly great good is often 
done by the efforts in this direction; the 
training seems to pay. Only good can come 
of a study of the methods of production of 
the changes that occur, and it is pertinent 
enough to ask if we really do produce new 
traits, or if when they come to people as 
new qualities they are not really a late 
appearance of hereditary traits slightly 
enhanced, it may be, by cultivation. 

We do not try much to train a dull intel- 
lect, but are content to let it fill a humble 
and useful place in the world ; it can be a 
plodder and work ; it can serve. If it is dull 
enough to be irresponsible or imbecile, if it 
cannot serve even, we train it ; but if it is 
only dull we let it work out alone such 
development as it can. Rather it is the 
man of wayward passions and propensities, 
who comes of very low parents, or exactly 
the opposite, whom we seek to save by 
our training. And if he is saved, we are 
sure to credit our efforts for the whole of 
it. But often it is not training in the true 
sense at all, but only some accidental or 
unexpected influence on the emotional 
nature that is effective. One emotion or 
129 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

propensity may be and often is completely 
responsible for the bad career of one of the 
parents. Perhaps it is envy or jealousy; a 
hatred of certain people or classes; too 
great a love for certain things; too much 
selfishness of one form or another; an 
inability to draw the line between truth and 
fiction; a belief that the world owes them 
a living, or has toward them a grudge, or 
has wronged them — any one of these may 
warp a life into a monstrosity, as meas- 
ured by the calipers of society. Do we 
train the children of such into our ideal 
men and women? To a slight degree, per- 
haps; to a vastly greater degree we fail, or 
we hit by chance upon ways to help them 
avoid the misguiding impulses. Or rather 
our social state or their social state and 
environment happens to accomplish this end 
— and often the hit is accidental, undesigned 
and unexpected. It is true enough that we 
try unceasingly to evoke sentiments and 
develop impulses that we think will improve 
or save them, but often they spurn our 
efforts and are saved by some chance influ- 
ence that we had not thought of. The 
watchful zeal of all the self-constituted and 
often nagging monitors, who stand over us 
to see that we do not go astray, may be lost 

130 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

in the face of one sweet word of encourage- 
ment and faith that comes like a fragrant 
zephyr from an unexpected quarter. 

One cardinal truth we usually forget, 
namely, that a human being from infancy to 
full adult age often passes through several 
phases of character and conduct that are as 
diverse as saints and sinners, that are 
directly and always hereditary, and yet that 
are to most minds utterly inexplicable on 
such grounds. The confusion comes of sup- 
posing that every individual is either good 
or bad, or once bad is always so, and once 
good must so remain — instead of the truth 
that all good people have some faults, and 
even very bad people have some good in 
them ; or of supposing that every individual 
through life lives in one and the same moral 
groove. A boy may be a proper subject for 
the penitentiary, if not the asylum, and the 
rounded manhood of the same individual be 
fit to canonize; or the reverse may be the 
case. For example, take the outlandish 
behavior of some children of good people. 
The boys are rowdies, bandits and thieves; 
they are abusive to everybody at times, and 
wholly unmanageable; into all manner of 
mischief, and always aping the boys that are 
most worthless and reckless. They are 

131 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

barbarians, and show how most of us have 
not advanced much. Girls sometimes, in 
their sphere and circle, exhibit traits that 
prove they are of the same race as the boys. 
One peculiar trait is that of palming off their 
fiction for truth, and a trait of many of both 
sexes is marked cruelty to the lower animals, 
and often to other children. The motive of 
cruelty is probably based on the emotion of 
pleasure that comes to the barbarian phases 
of most natures at the discomfort and mis- 
fortunes of others, and to the natural child 
desire (a recurrence to barbarism again) to 
domineer and rule. Let any such children 
happen to carry these traits into adult life, 
and they are socially ruined. That they do 
not usually carry them through life is 
because it is a part of the evolution of their 
natures, their hereditary tendency, to 
change with each half decade up to full 
adult responsibility, and they mostly arrive 
at this period with those motives and im- 
pulses in control of them that make decent 
members of the community. 

People often enough wonder how a cer- 
tain incorrigible boy could be born to such 
superbly balanced parents as he has; and 
declare that there must be some hitch in the 
heredity, or that this is a case where hered- 
132 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

itary influences failed to work. Neither is 
the case. There is seventy-five per cent of 
certainty that his parents, one or both of 
them, passed through the identical moral 
phase at his time of life, and some day his 
neighbors may wonder how so exemplary a 
citizen as he will become could ever have 
such hoodlums of boys as his sons, in spite 
of their mother, will perhaps be. And do 
you think any amount of training would 
change this order of things and make the 
fifteenth year trait appear at the tenth? Did 
you ever see training avail in such cases? 
True it is that the boys improve while the 
training is going on, but we ought to be fair 
to the evolutionary changes, and not 
attribute their results to the drill. 

It is the birth of a wholesome self-con- 
sciousness, and the passing out of the period 
of carelessness and rebellion against advice 
and refinement into one of normal self- 
respect, that produces the change in most of 
these boys — it is the march of time more 
than an37- training, as such, that is the 
determining influence. 

I would not underrate or discredit train- 
ing of a wholesome sort for any child. But 
training to be wholesome must be both 
necessary and useful; and much of that 

^33 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

bestowed on unbecoming and wayward chil- 
dren is useless, and some of it is both 
unnecessary and mischievous. 

It is useless to nag children to keep their 
clothes clean, when a period of life is com- 
ing soon that will make them desire to do 
this. 

During the clown period your boy may not 
keep his room in order, nor turn down the 
bed-clothes when he gets up in the morn- 
ing, nor behave himself in a polite manner 
in company or at table, nor walk in a 
decorous way along the street, unless you 
are constantly at his heels to watch and train 
him. But what is the use of wasting your 
energy over these things when he will 
normally evolve himself out of his loutish- 
ness, and that quickly, as the years fly? 

Your girl may romance to you with a 
sober face, and build all manner of fiction 
for you, showing her thraldom to emotions 
that, should she continue unchanged, would 
by and by scandalize her if not you. But 
almost as sure as the sun, her development 
will in a few years bring her a spirit of 
genuine honesty and purity that will give 
you comfort to your dying day. 

The best training for children is manifestly 
of that gentle sort, which, always firm and 

134 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

along certain lines effective, never degener- 
ates into garrulous hectoring, but always 
keeps their confidence. 

The greatest power over a child is possible 
only when he believes you understand him 
and have some sympathy with his soul. 
Thousands of boys have been made worse 
through too much training by their elders, 
who have forgotten their own childhood. 
Their elders have been too short-sighted to 
see that if in certain directions they would 
mostly let the boys alone a few years, much 
of the training would be unnecessary; and 
it could hardly be expected that the boys 
would have the mental scope to see that if 
they could bear the discipline a few years it 
would come to an end. 

Their parents have looked on their pranks 
as showing permanent sins to be immediately 
corrected at all hazards and at any cost or 
penalty. The boys have regarded their 
discipline as the fixed order and fate of their 
whole lives, from which any escape was justi- 
fiable. And so some have run away, some 
have expended vast ingenuity to circumvent 
their discipline, and others have been driven 
from harmless roguery to crime, and a few 
have committed suicide, while multitudes 
have acquired a permanent sense and spirit 

135 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

of bitterness that have tinged their whole 
after lives with darkness. 

Heredity makes it possible for some to do 
what the majority cannot attain. It makes 
it impossible for some to refrain from doing 
certain things that the majority can easily 
avoid. 

Some of these things are offenses against 
taste and decorum ; some of them are crimes. 

If an offense is unavoidable by reason of 
heredity, shall a man be punished for it? 
Shall a man be held responsible for what 
was born in him? The inference is plain, 
but human judges are too fallible to say 
when an offense is certainly unavoidable, or 
how far self-control can go, or just the point 
at which it ceases in a particular person and 
under particular circumstances, and so the 
rules of society and the laws of the state 
must be inexorable to all but that poorly 
defined class, the insane. 

Heredity cannot excuse, but it may 
explain many of the lapses of our poor 
human nature. And the knowledge of it 
ought to lead us to that charity that forgives 
wisely, and to that helpfulness that does not 
hinder but helps truly. 

The line between strict sanity and insanity 
is poorly drawn and always must be. 

136 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

Measured by the normal, ideal mentality of 
the race a large proportion of people are 
insane, and this is the contention of some 
alienists. But a fit and workable definition 
of insanity cannot be made on such severe 
lines ; for if nearly everybody is insane then 
we must have some other term for those 
unfortunates who require the restraints or 
indulgence of society and the state. We 
use the word degenerate to cover cases of 
abnormal mentality that do not easily fall 
within the meaning of insanity. Some of 
these cases have unsymmetrically developed 
bodies, especially skulls, as well as brains. 
Some of the degenerates are very near to 
genius, but they are also very near to the 
most conservative definition of insanity. 
Thousands of such people have been impris- 
oned for crimes, and hundreds have been put 
to death for offenses against the state. Can 
such things be justified on any ground what- 
ever? 

Popular sentiment revolts against the 
idea of punishing an insane person. If the 
victim be called a degenerate, it does not 
seem half so awful, albeit awful enough. Most 
habitual criminals are degenerates, and if all 
these were to be spared the convictions would 
not be half as many as they are to-day. But 

137 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

all degenerates and many insane are capable 
of some self-control, though less than normal 
people, and if punitive measures are insti- 
tuted and calculated to foster self-control 
against crime, they are not improperly 
applied to these persons. The death- 
penalty is, of course, out of the argument as 
to the victim, and whether it produces any 
wholesome repressive effect on the living is 
a question in dispute. The thing it does 
sometimes is to remove from the world a 
man who might commit other enormous 
crimes ; the thing it does often is to satisfy 
the popular demand for a victim and for 
vengeance. 

In the extent of responsibility to which 
we hold erring humanity, it is a thousand 
pities that we could not always be fair. But 
the limitation of our knowledge is so sharp^ 
our wisdom is so faulty and we are so liable 
to have our opinions and actions colored by 
our own possible degeneracy, that we can 
only hope to strive after complete justice 
without ever attaining it. We may know 
the basis of justice in the abstract, and make 
rules about it that shall seem to be faultless, 
but to apply them with more than the 
crudest possible fairness to individual cases 
is, with our fallibility, practically impossible. 

138 



SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 

We cannot judge of the degree of degener- 
acy, or even ordinarily of the degree of 
lunacy, that will excuse a particular man 
from the legal punishment of his crime, as 
long as, under ordinary circumstances, he 
passes for a normal or even erratic member 
of society and attends to his business. 

So we shall probably go on as we have 
done, sending the wrong man to prison, and 
the man to prison wrongfully ; sending to the 
gallows the man who should be in an 
asylum, and perhaps sometimes the reverse; 
and holding men to a standard of resistance 
to temptation that neither the judges nor 
jurymen are ever equal to. 



139 



Our Poorly Educated 
Educators 



Our Poorly Educated 
Educators 



Words are tools of thought. 

Definitions are the mile-posts and g^ide- 
boards of reasoning. 

If two understand their words and defini- 
tions alike ; if their tools are the same and 
they handle them similarly, they can reason 
together and agree, and so get on. 

But if, as usually happens, they use words 
and premises differently; if these have for 
them different significations, they will, as 
usually happens also, dispute and differ if 
not quarrel over the simplest thing. Most 
disputes of life grow out of this kind of 
beginnings. 

One difficulty is that definitions change. 
A word begins its career with a single 
definite meaning which the dictionary and 

143 



OUR EDUCATORS 

the literature give clearly. In a quarter of 
a century another and quite variant meaning 
is added ; and in three centuries perhaps half 
a dozen more have succeeded each other at 
varying intervals, each called into being by 
the needs of life or by the whim or the love of 
change of some writer. One may use with 
propriety on occasion any one of the eight 
shades of meaning. 

This mutability of the language has its dis- 
advantages, if also its advantages ; language 
will and must change and grow. If only it 
would not change without reason or need! 
There are some stalwart souls among us who 
think the language should never change, but 
remain as it was. The conservative peda- 
gogues have bravely stood in the breach and 
tried to stem the rush for change for the 
sake of change, and they have done some 
good. They have made war on every fresh 
invention of slang as they would fight fire ; 
and have shamed us for catching at new 
words and uses of them, as we rush after 
new fashions in clothes. 

But men look at things differently as time 
goes on, and so names and definitions must 
have different meanings, according as we 
occupy the old or the new ground. The 
world moves whether or not it advances. 
144 



OUR EDUCATORS 

Perhaps in no field of thought have defini- 
tions changed more than in that of education 
and pedagogy. What the word education 
should mean; what the best education is — 
that which is worthy of the name ; and how 
and in what order it ought to be undertaken 
and carried on, are, according to the best 
minds, widely different from what they were 
a century ago. Then education had little or 
less necessary relation to the duties and 
cares of life ; it was determined by fashion 
and the worship of the ancient ; now it has, or 
is growing to have, for its cardinal object, 
before which all else must bend, the fit- 
ting of the learner for the struggle for exist- 
ence and the tussle with the world. He is 
best educated who has the largest knowledge 
of his environment past and present, in- 
cluding of course the human race, and 
whose development has taken that course 
and sequence that best fit him for life in 
the social body. This is only another way 
of saying that true education means the 
largest development of the mind for useful 
sociological ends. Education must fit a man 
for life and career; our careers must be 
in the body social, and we aim at the highest 
career possible for each. 

A further study of the process, or analysis 

145 



OUR EDUCATORS 

of it, shows that the thing that takes place is 
the formation of mental habits. A deeper 
scrutiny reveals that what happens is the 
production of relative automatisms of action 
of the nerve centers. So he is best educated 
who has the largest and most manageable 
series of orderly and useful habits in the 
action of the brain and other nerve centers. 
And these habits include and cover what are 
ordinarily understood to be facts as well as 
reasoning and action. That brain is most 
equipped which on the greatest number 
and variety of occasions in life acts in a 
fairly automatic manner in the best way for 
the usefulness and happiness of the individ- 
ual. Such a personality not only has the 
highest order of education, but has also 
the largest development of character in its 
broadest sense. 

In acquiring or giving education the 
temptation is to seek too much in one 
direction to the neglect of most beside; to 
follow books so assiduously that a habit is 
formed of thinking that no knowledge can 
reach us save through books, and that we 
cannot attain wisdom by any other means. 

Books then become, not merely the record 
of men's thoughts, observations and acts, 
but they grow to be somehow sacred, and so 
146 



OUR EDUCATORS 

their following becomes blind and unreason- 
ing; it amounts to worship. 

Specialism in study — most indispensable 
for the greatest development of thought and 
progress of the world — logically tends in this 
very direction. The specialist is liable, 
even likely, to build himself up in one direc- 
tion to the neglect of everything that does 
not minister in some way to this end. He 
sometimes after many years grows into such 
an unconscious worship of authority, other- 
wise books, that he fails to discover that 
younger students, less bound by the books 
and by tradition, and more given to the 
study of the actualities, are going down to 
the heart of nature, acquiring new views and 
larger understanding of things, and rush- 
ing past their elders to revolutionize the 
specialties themselves. This is no less true 
of educators than of the rest of the world. 
Pedagogues like to believe with others that 
there is some final authority, that certain 
foundations are fixed and immutable; not 
possible to be disturbed by future discover- 
ies. It is the man so brazen as to hunt for 
defects in these very bed-rocks who will g^ve 
us no peace. 

Educators in all lines, especially the higher 
ones, are apt to be specialists; it could not 

147 



OUR EDUCATORS 

be otherwise. Great educators must be 
investigators; and one mind cannot at this 
day investigate many fields of knowledge and 
hope to add something to all of them. 

Does specialism on the part of educators, or 
any other influence, narrow them, to the 
injury of their work and of their influence 
on the young? Do they tend to become, in 
the broadest sense, poorly educated? 

Before asking for a theory of a fact it is 
pertinent to set forth the fact. And the fact 
is that many of our educators and not a few 
working in the higher fields are by the best 
modem definitions very poorly educated. 
They. are unequipped in the great problems 
of the world; they are unfit to deal with 
their environment. They can do nothing but 
teach — they have often tried other fields of 
labor, to fail in each and finally come back 
to teaching as the sole thing they are capa- 
ble of doing ; and many of them know little 
outside of their particular specialties, and 
some are very poor teachers. These state- 
ments need no statistical proof ; they are so 
well known as to stand without argument. 

This is an age of practical things. The 
thousand things and processes in and about 
our daily lives, thanks to the study of 
nature, are now fairly well known ; they are 

148 



OUR EDUCATORS 

rational and not to be explained by myths 
-that explain nothing. They are easily 
known, not mysterious; more than ever 
before they tell in a man's life and career, 
and no one can be educated without a large 
knowledge of them. This is the philosophy 
of common things, and in this modern day it 
is as essential to every symmetrical char- 
acter, as is that automatic method of con- 
sidering things that is common to the better 
part of the race, and so is called common- 
sense Stuart Mill was wrong in holding 
that a man should know everything of some- 
thing and something of everything. Every 
one should indeed know thoroughly some 
one subject. But there are some dozens of 
subjects and hundreds of topics about which 
any man may be ignorant without impro- 
priety. Only these do not include the com- 
mon matters of his environment; the things 
he rubs against every day of his existence. 
Of all such subjects, he should know at least 
something, and complete ignorance is mex- 
cusable; in one who undertakes to teach 
pupils above the years of early childhood, 
such ignorance is reprehensible. 

It is a wide knowledge of common things 
that fits a man to keep away from the wall 
in the struggle for existence ; it enables him, 
149 



OUR EDUCATORS 

as nothing else can, to make a respectable 
race with his competitors, and to earn their 
respect and his own comfort as well as 
respect by doing it. 

Snch a knowledge of common things 
always consists with great education in a 
particular direction, and with the highest 
expertness; it aids such expertness. Yet 
there are teachers who are large enough to 
be ignorant of many things outside of their 
special fields — and small enough to be proud 
of their ignorance of the common knowledge 
of the world. When a man reaches this 
point, or cannot rise above it, he needs a 
great deal of what we call personal character 
to save him from losing his influence over 
the young and his influence in the com- 
munity. 

Only a few can be great experts, most 
must be plain, common students and edu- 
cators in various, often numerous, lines. 
For the higher education and the graduate 
study, expert teachers must be had. But 
the mass of people cannot have the higher 
education, nor do post-graduate work. They 
may, nevertheless, be wise in a little educa- 
tion, and they must plod. How to give 
them the greatest wisdom with whatsoever 
education they may have is the problem. 

ISO 



OUR EDUCATORS 

This cannot be done by withholding from 
them the world's knowledge of common 
things; nor is any teacher fit to instruct 
them who is ignorant of it. The greatest 
teacher is the one who has the largest good 
influence over his pupils and gives to the 
greatest degree direction to their after 
thought and work, and that teacher is usually 
well informed in many directions while per- 
haps expert in one. 

It is a melancholy truth that many of our 
educators are ignorant of a multitude of 
facts about many subjects that any well- 
informed person knows about. This is 
neither creditable nor necessary. They 
should have more general common knowl- 
edge than the average well-informed citizen, 
and vastly more than the average of the 
parents of their pupils. There is no justifi- 
cation for general ignorance in the fact that 
they are informed on some few subjects ; the 
needs of specialism do not require this. 

Nothing sets forth the situation with more 
vividness than when some teacher of a 
restricted department, perhaps of the 
classics, goes out on a vacation tour with a 
lot of inquisitive young students. He gets 
tangled up hopelessly a dozen times in 
twenty-four hours. The history of some 

151 



OUR EDUCATORS 

actual occurrences of this kind would make 
racy reading. 

Imagine a small if perhaps a voluble child 
asking the professor why the pebbles in the 
bank are rounded and do not have sharp 
corners. Then imagine the professor wish- 
ing the teacher of geology were there to tell 
them why. 

The boys see a fog appear to approach 
from the ocean, and they ask what fog is. 
And does it really come from the ocean? 
And what is dew, and where does it come 
from? And why does it rain? The replies 
of the professor are a fine attempt to talk 
without committing himself, for he does not 
answer one of the questions. 

They camp out at night and dispute as to 
whether the night air is damp. Then they 
would know why it is colder sleeping in the 
uncovered wagon than under it, and their 
teacher cannot tell definitely and clearly any 
of these things. They wonder why certain 
kinds of clothing, as wool, cotton, or linen, 
are warmer than others, and wait in vain for 
a clear and rational answer. 

In their tramp next day they see luscious 
grapes growing on the rockiest and appar- 
ently most barren soil. How can such soil 
produce for fifty successive years good crops 

152 



OUR EDUCATORS 

of grapes with tons of sugar and wonderful 
flavor each year, and the last year as good 
as the first? And no one can tell them. 
They cannot see how the sugar can be found 
in such rocks, and the professor suggests 
that the laboratory of nature in the earth 
must be wonderful; he taxes their faith 
instead of giving them a plain answer that 
is so very easy. 

Then when they stop at a country tavern 
and like small barbarians insist on going 
into the kitchen, one small questioner sets 
them all in a flutter by asking why the 
doughnuts "boil" the moment they drop into 
the hot lard. The lard doesn't boil, and the 
dough does. Why are the doughnuts cooked 
in lard anyhow? Why not cook them in hot 
water? The teacher — their fountain of wis- 
dom — cannot tell them. 

Then why does the bread rise? Why is 
the butter rancid? No answer. The pro- 
fessor could not tell what fire is, and what 
happens when things burn. And if one of 
the boys had asked him to tell why oiled 
rags sometimes take fire spontaneously he 
would have fled from the room. 

Distilled water is served at the table, and 
the small boy again wants to know why it is 
flat to the taste, and the professor says it is 

153 



OUR EDUCATORS 

because the life is left out of it in the distil- 
lation ; it is dead. Imagine such an answer 
from the teacher of anybody ! 

When asked how the water drank is 
appropriated by the human body, this 
educator has forgotten his physiology, if he 
ever studied it, and cannot give a clear 
answer to save his life. 

The boys go out after the lunch and see 
an electric motor at work, and ask the 
simplest and most natural of all questions, 
namely, why the current makes the wheel 
revolve in one direction and not the other. 
The professor is completely floored by it, 
and the electrician of the works, presuppos- 
ing a knowledge of terms and principles that 
common students could not possibly have, 
gives a good explanation of the whole 
process, that shoots entirely over the heads 
of them all. 

Then they insist on being told how a tele- 
phone really works, and look to their teacher, 
and quite in vain, for a simple explanation 
of that device that we have had among us in 
familiar use for more than a fifth of a century. 

They come back to the tavern at night and 
listen to stories and wrangles among the 
habitues of the place about all sorts of 
things. 

154 



OUR EDUCATORS 

A dispute occurs as to whether a fish float- 
ing in water weighs more or less after it is 
dead than when it was alive, and the pro- 
fessor is in doubt how it is, or why the fish 
floats to the top and lies on its back as soon 
as it dies. 

Then they fall to telling ghost stories 
and superstitions, in which all more or less 
join. All protest that they are not super- 
stitious, but nearly every one shows some 
weakness in this direction. One declares 
that he doesn't believe in the notion at all, 
yet he would rather not start on a journey or 
begin an important business on Friday ; that 
is the way he feels, he doesn't know just why. 
Another instinctively counts the company, 
and if he finds it numbers exactly thirteen 
he suddenly discovers he has an engagement 
and must go. After the wrangle they go 
out for a walk, and find the new moon has 
just appeared, and the boys are a trifle 
amused to see the professor turn round so as 
to bring his right shoulder next the orb as he 
first beholds it. 

Some will protest that it would require a 
large knowledge of meteorology, botany, 
geology, physics and chemistry to under- 
stand all the things this professor was 
bothered about, and that a common teacher 

155 



OUR EDUCATORS 

must not be expected to be informed on so 
large a range of subjects. Or that schools 
do their greatest good through the beau- 
tiful atmosphere of culture and scholar- 
ship with which pupils are surrounded. 
Men of education, successful in life, are 
quoted as saying that the ministry of their 
school days was mainly of this kind. Then 
we are told that the chief thing a pupil 
gets from his teacher, that lasts forever, is 
development and strength of character — that 
if he gets these and a smattering of knowl- 
edge it is sufficient, and that the chief thing 
a teacher ought to have is character. 

Now, there are some truths in this conten- 
tion ; indeed, it is all true except the infer- 
ential propositions that the teacher should 
not know something, and should not think. 

If a person is so ignorant of the very 
primer of these sciences as not to be able to 
understand most of such simple questions as 
the boys put to the professor, then he is not 
educated, and ought not to enter on the 
business of trying to educate the men and 
women of the future. These are the basal 
principles of the simplest common knowl- 
edge of mankind, and it is childish for edu- 
cators to plead justification for ignorance of 
them. Every man and woman ought to 



OUR EDUCATORS 

know something of these sciences, and must 
if they observe and think at all about their 
environment. 

This knowledge does not have to be got- 
ten out of books. It does not have to come 
with any formal or formidable study of these 
subjects; but mostly it comes logically and 
unconsciously, but unerringly — naturally — 
even to the unlettered thinking man. 
Should all men and women of thought know 
something of geology, zoology, botany, 
chemistry, physics, and meteorology? By 
all means yes— and every truly, even 
slightly, educated person does. . 

To say the doughnuts boil because the 
water they contain is made into steam by the 
hot lard, does not tax the memory of book 
reading or some school study. Every 
thoughtful person knows it by observation, 
and everybody who has seen yeast in fer- 
mentation, full of bubbles that must be made 
by the yeast plant, knows, even if he is 
unable to read and write, that it is the same 
bubbles in the dough that make it porous 
and make it rise. Shall a teacher of men 
be excused for ignorance deeper and denser 
than an unlettered man has? 

Every one knows that a newspaper put 
over the tomjato vines at night will keep off 

157 



OUR EDUCATORS 

the hoarfrost, and that clouds and smoke do 
the same thing, and yet to the teacher's 
mind the question of the relative temperature 
in the uncovered wagon and under it is a 
mystery insoluble. 

People may not know that sugar and starch 
are carbon products, and that all such come 
out of the air through the enormously out- 
spread surface of the leaves of plants, and 
that all the plants ever get out of the earth 
are water and the mineral salts that go into 
vegetable growth, and that, therefore, a 
rocky soil, if it contains the right salts and 
can get water, may produce grapes or grain 
as long as these conditions last. But shall 
teachers of the young be excused from 
knowing such a cardinal and simple thing? 
These are questions that touch the industries 
of life, the bread earning of existence. 

The telephone and the electric motor may 
be left to the expert few, but growth of 
plants, the making of food, and the preserva- 
tion of animal heat by clothes and houses 
and roofs and fires, touch the life of the 
people to which all education must con- 
tribute, or it is rubbish. 

For the growing generations the atmos- 
phere of culture and thought of the schools 
is blessed forever. But what is this -atmos- 

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OUR EDUCATORS 

phere? Analyze it and tell what it consists 
in! It is very little but the influence of 
honest and critical thought, and for that is 
my contention. I would abolish most of the 
teachers who do not think and reason. The 
greatest service a teacher ever renders a 
student is to show him how to think, and 
think for himself. By so much as wisdom 
is greater than knowledge is this higher than 
the teaching of mere facts. 

I know there is something beside all this in 
the atmosphere of school life. There are the 
amenities and the fashions of culture; the 
things that make a man appear cultivated, 
as his manners and his pronunciation. But 
all these are little in the struggle of life 
compared with learning to think and master- 
ing the first principles of all knowledge. 

In the educational results nobody would 
discount or discredit that something called 
character, otherwise continuity in good 
purposes, honesty and kindliness. But I 
have never heard that observation and crit- 
ical thinking are inimical to character, nor 
that a man is likely to fall from grace 
because he has come to know somewhat, nor 
that largeness of information and maturity 
of wisdom will shut out of mind essential 
morality. 

159 



OUR EDUCATORS 

The needs of the times are for broad, 
sensible, scientific, wholesome people for 
teachers of the young. There is no need of 
unbalanced, one-sided people, nor of prodigies 
and geniuses. It is no kindly wish for any 
child that he should emulate one of these 
last. 

Geniuses are many of them degenerates ; 
which means that they are one-sided and 
unbalanced. They have one faculty excess- 
ively developed, and other quite as useful 
ones correspondingly dwarfed. They are 
apt to be overwrought, hypercritical and 
intemperate in their characterization of 
things, and they are generally unwholesome 
guides. We call them geniuses because 
they are over-developed in some one credit- 
able direction. Some of us sit at their feet 
and pray we may be like them, when, if 
most men were to become like them, the 
social organization would be impossible — the 
social state would cease. 

Such people are not useless to the world, 
but often very useful. They frequently 
startle mankind by their strides for progress 
and for good. But their proper place is in 
the laboratory, the study, the field or on the 
expedition; rarely at the teacher's desk. 
The dwarfing of some good qualities injures 
i6o 



OUR EDUCATORS 

them for teachers; their excessively devel- 
oped gifts and powers sometimes fit them 
to do things mightily. Better teachers than 
they could probably be found in every town. 
Good educators are characterful and bal- 
anced men and women, superior and able; 
they do not need to be phenomenal. They 
make good models for boys and girls and 
every student of high aspirations has such a 
model that colors his whole after life 
through his emulation of admired and usually 
admirable qualities. Every yearning youth 
has a hero, and must have, and he copies 
unconsciously some of his notions, his mental 
bent, his mannerisms, and sometimes even 
his vices. Early the youth is liable to glory 
in some older or bolder boy who is usually 
admired for his buncombe and bravado, or 
for his recklessness. This is one of the 
barbarian phases of the boy's evolution 
which rarely lasts very long. Many success- 
ful men, potent in the affairs of the world, 
have looked back with pride to the models of 
their youth, the men they have emulated. 
Can you recall many models of such men 
who were not symmetrical characters? Men 
are not proud of the unsymmetrical ; the 
people with supernumerary members or 
angular mental faculties. If the hero is ^ 
i6i . 



OUR EDUCATORS 

normal nature the copying is useful, but if he 
is a genius, with vicious excrescences, the 
worshiper is sure to grow a warped char- 
acter. It is better to emulate nobody than 
a degenerate. 

The best teachers are those most fit to be 
admired in the calm measure of after school 
years. These teachers are not prodigies; 
but they are sound and stable, cultivated and 
intelligent, never erratic and undisciplined, 
always poised, good "all round" people. 
They are thoughtful, faithful, observing and 
skeptical people, who subject everything to 
the test of reason and common-sense. They 
are candid people, with gentle tempers; 
they mostly look you quietly but squarely in 
the face without a quiver; and they wear 
well. 

Preachers often tell the story of the edu- 
cation for the ministry of boys who have 
been found after vain efforts and trials to be 
utterly worthless for any other occupation. 
Doctors sometimes tell the same story to 
explain the presence of inefficient members 
in their own profession. The medical pro- 
fession suffers in this way more than the 
clerical, and the profession of teaching 
suffers more than either, and probably more 
than any other. 

162 



OUR EDUCATORS 

It is bad enough to admit men and 
women to the profession who are poorly 
equipped and qualified; it is a worse and a 
commoner offense to keep them after their 
unfitness is shown. Not only are many 
kept after they are found to be unfit, but 
they continue to stay because they have 
stayed ; there is something about the popular 
conscience that helps them to fasten their 
clutch on a position more firmly solely 
because they have held it. School boards 
are not the best judges of the art of teach- 
ing; weak teachers can any day hide from 
then; their own ignorance of a thousand 
things every teacher ought to know— and 
the teachers themselves say they teach well, 
and they ought to know about it. More- 
over, the teachers need work— that always 
appeals. 

Many an incompetent teacher becomes 
proficient by observation of the currents and 
tides; by growth. But often he grows fixed 
in ways and prejudices and eccentricities as 
the years go, and so is progressively less fit 
to teach the young, and more of a menace to 
the social and political body. 

We are all guilty of numerous wrongs upon 
the young, and not the least of them is our 
modern extravagant indulgence of children 
163 



OUR EDUCATORS 

in their own bent and their own way in con- 
duct, manners, work and play ; in study and 
learning. Our sin of non-discipline is 
almost as great as was that of the severity of 
the earlier centuries. Affection is no justi- 
fication for granting a pleasure to-day that is 
sure to cut deep to-morrow or some other 
day; and almost the foolishest speech a 
successful man or womain can make is to say 
that they will spare their children all the 
struggles and privations — most of them 
developmental in the highest degree — which 
they themselves early had to endure. 
Modern ease of existence has tried with 
some success to kill off the more stalwart 
virtues, but one thing the community owes 
to itself to do for the rising generation. It 
owes it to the men and women of to-morrow 
that they shall as far as possible associate 
with and learn of the most sensible, best 
rounded people, the most sane and whole- 
some natures, folks who are freest from 
hysteria and crankiness of all sorts, and even 
from the heroics of ostentatious goodness. 



164 



PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEY 
AND SONS COMPANY AT THE 
LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL. 



By HAROLD FREDERIC 

GLORIA MUNDI: A NOVEL 

Mr. Frederic's two triumphs of the last few years 
have been "The Damnation of Theron Ware" in 
serious fiction and "March Hares" in a light and 
brilliantly witty style which is all his own. " Gloria 
Mundi " comes as his first work since the publication 
of these two successful books — and happily enough 
— it combines the keen thoughtful analysis of the one 
with the delicacy of touch of the other. Mr. Frederic 
takes for his hero a young man brought up without 
much attention in the south of France, who, by a 
wholly unexpected combination of circumstances, 
falls heir to an English earldom. His entire training 
has unfitted him for the position, and Mr. Frederic 
makes much of the diflBiculties it forces upon him. 
The other characters are some good and bad mem- 
bers of the nobility, an " actress-lady," and a type- 
writer. 

12mo. Cloth. Uniform with " The Damnation of 
Theron Ware." $1.50. 



THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE 

It is unnecessary at this time to say much of " The 
Damnation of Theron Ware" or "Illumination" as 
it is called in England. The sales have already 
reached thirty-five thousand, which is in itself the 
most substantial evidence of the novel's readable- 
ness. Owing to the failure of its former publishers 
the book was temporarily out of print, but it is now 
enjoying a constant and certain success. 

The merit of the book is worthy of special praise because of 
the exceptional strength, variety, and originality of the char- 
acters.— Cfewefand World. 

Mr. Frederic has written a daring story, and one which is 
doubly impressive because of the straightforward simplicity of 
his manner of presenting his case. His attack is certainly a bold 
one, and it will be strange if he does not bring down the unani- 
mous maledictions of the cloth on his devoted hea,d.— Chicago 
Evening Post. 

12mo. Cloth. Thirty-fifth thousand. $1.50. 
Hekbeet S. Stone & Co., Chicago & New York. 



By H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR 

THE VICE OP FOOLS 

A novel of society life in Washington. 

The great success of Mr. Chatfield-Taylor's society 
novels gives assurance of a large sale to this new 
story. It can hardly be denied that few persons in 
this country are better qualified to treat the " smart 
set" in various American cities, and the life in 
diplomatic circles offers an unusually picturesque 
opportunity. 

Mr. Chatfield-Taylor has brought out a fourth novel, and one 
which is distinctly a gain in style over his previous achievements 
in that line. As a series of society scenes the panorama of the 
hook is perfect. A dinner at the Hungarian embassy is detailed 
with much humor, great pictorial power and keen knowledge. 
The dialogue may be characterized heartily as crisp, witty, and 
sparkling. Mr. Chatfield-Taylor proves himself a past master of 
epigram; and if society were to talk a tenth as well as he repre- 
sents there would be no cause for accusing it of frivolity. — 
Chicago Times-Herald. 

16mo. Cloth. With ten full-page illustrations by 
Eaymond M. Crosby. Fifth thousand. $1.50. 



TWO WOMEN AND A FOOL 

The story of an actress, an artist and a very sweet 
girl. The scenes are laid in Chicago, London, and 
Paris; in theatres, studios, and bachelor apartments. 
It is the history of an infatuation — with moral inter- 
ludes. 

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor, whom Paul Bourget has named 
as the most promising novelist of American social life, has given 
us a clever story in "Two Women and a Fool." The tale is 
retrospective; one hears it from the lips of Guy, an artist; and it 
concerns his love for two women, a very naughty and an ex- 
tremely nice one, Moiia and Dorothy respectively. Moira, who 
becomes a soubrette, leads Guy, who becomes a successful artist, 
a tremendous pace, wearying him at length, but still holding the 
power to revive him with her look that allures. The romance 
leaps from Chicago to London and Paris and back to the Windy 
City again. It is steadily entertaining, and its dialogue, which 
is always witty, is often brilliant. C. D. Gibson's pictures are 
really illustrative. — Philadelphia Press. 

18mo. Cloth. With frontispiece by C. D. Gibson. 
Ninth thousand. $0.75. 

Herbert S. Stone & Co., Chicago & New York, 



By ROBERT HICHENS 

THE LONDONERS: AN ABSXJRDITY 

" The Green Carnation *' was among the most amus- 
ing society sketches that recent years have given us. 
After it Mr. Hichens, perhaps wisely, devoted himself 
to much more serious work. In " The Londoners " 
he returns to his original manner without making his 
burlesque so personal. It is the story of a smart 
woman, wearied by her position and its duties, who 
seeks to get out of society. The idea is an original 
one, and when contrasted with the efforts of a second 
heroine to get into society, the result is wholly delight- 
ful. The story has already attained a considerable 
popularity. 

With a cover designed by Claude F. Bragdon. 
12mo. Cloth. Second impression, f 1.50. 



FLAMES: A LONDON FANTASY 

The book is sure to be widely read.— iu^ato Commercial. 

It carries on the attention of the reader from the first chapter 
to the last. Full of exciting incidents, very modern, excessively 
up to date. — London Daily Tekffraph. 

In his last book Mr. Hichens has entirely proved himself. His 
talent does not so much lie in the conventional novel, but more 
in his strange and fantastic medium. " Flames " suits him, has 
him at his best.— PoU MaU Oazette. 

"Flames " is a jKjwerful story, not only for the novelty of its 
plot, but for the skill with which it is worked out, the brilliancy 
of its descriptions of the London streets, of the seamy side of the 
city's life which night turns to the beholder; but the descriptions 
are neither erotic nor morbid. * . * * We may repudiate the 
central idea of soul-transference, but the theory is made the 
vehicle of this striking tale in a manner that is entirely sane and 
wholesome. It leaves no bad taste in the mouth. * * * 
"Flames" — it is the author's fancy that the soul is like a little 
flame, and hence the title— must be read with care. There is 
much epigrammatic writing in it that will delight the literary 
palate. It is far and away ahead of anything that Mr. Hichens 
nas ever written before. — Brooklyn Eagle. 

With a cover designed by F. R. Kimbrough. 12mo. 
Cloth. Second impression. $1.50. 

Herbert S. Stone & Co., Chicago & New York. 



By HENRY JAMES 

IN THE CAGE: A NOVELETTE 

With, every recent story Mr. James seems to have 
entered a new field. " What Maisie Knew " was cer- 
tainly a wide departure from his previous work, and 
" In The Cage," the life of a girl behind the wire 
screen of an English telegraph office, is as novel as 
one could wish. The story is slight and the incidents 
are few, but the charm of Mr. James's style, the 
absolute precision of his expression, the keenness of 
the analysis make the book remarkable in contem- 
porary fiction. 

We could not wish for a better representation ot the art of Mr. 
Hemy James. In appearance it is only a sketch of a girl who 
works the telegraph in an oflSce that is part of a grocer's shop in 
the West End, but as background there is the extravagant world 
of fashion throwing out disjointed hints of vice and intrigue in 
messages handed in as indifferently as if the operator were only 
part of the machine. Nevertheless, she is a woman, too, and 
feminine interest and curiosity so quicken her wits that she is 
able to piece together " the high encounter with life, the large 
and complicated game" of her customers. This, in fact, is the 
romance in her life, the awakening touch to her imagination, 
and it is brought into skUful contrast with the passionless com- 
monplace of her own love. — Academy. 

12mo. Cloth. Uniform with "What Maisie 
Knew." $1.25. 

WHAT MAISIE KNEW: A NOVEL 

Henry James's masterpiece.— CAtcapo Times-Herald. 

It will rank as one of his most notable achievements.— JVew 
York Sun. 

The book contains some of the author's cleverest dialogue.— 
New York Tribune. 

" What Maisie Knew," taken all in all, contains some of the 
keenest, most profound analysis which has yet come from the 
pen of that subtle writer. There is no question that Henry 
James's latest work will sell.— iVew York Commercial Advertiser. 

It is quite impossible to ignore that, if the word have any 
significance and is ever to be used at all, we are here dealing 
with genius. This is a work of genius as much as Mr. Meredith's 
best work.^-PaM Mall Gazette. 

12mo. Third impression. $1.50. 
Herbert S. Stone & Co., Chicago & New York. 



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